Departure

We left Lenno this morning at about 10:30 am. I had decided to join the motorway north at Lugano instead of Como. I think this was a bad idea which wasted some time as it was longer on narrow country roads and then took us right through the centre of Lugano.

We stopped for a nice lunch at a motorway service area near the San Gottardo tunnel and then headed into Germany. I had booked a hotel in Karlsruhe to stay over for the might. All was going well until Freiburg when we hit a monumental traffic jam. I am not sure what the cause was but after a couple of hours of more or less not moving the autobahn was closed and we were taken off on to normal roads.

We got to Karlsruhe just as Germany was winning their match in the world cup. Lots of cars with flags and much hooting of horns. The area where the hotel is did not look to exciting, a typical city street of no particular interest. We were too late to think about looking for the city sights. As the area seemed rather suburban we decided to have dinner in the hotel. The courtyard in the hotel provided a pleasant enough backdrop to an Italian meal "al fresco". It began to cool down as we were finishing our meal, the waiters came around with fleece rugs for everybody. A nice touch.