Starting bright and early, after a late night at Coyote Ugly, the head of our program took us on a "walk up the hill" at 10 am. I consider myself a decently fit person. What I am lacking in upper body strength I attempt to make up for in lunges and squats. I will say this a million times in my blog... we are no longer in Appalachia my friends. We are not even in the Rockies. I am in the freaking Swiss Alps. The huge mountain in all my pictures that you can see from the lake and has a tower on top. The tower is actually a restaurant that you can take a vehicular to. When we told our Italian teacher that we hiked to the top and then all around the island to a small town named Marcote she laughed out loud. Then she laughed again. Then she said she advises student to take a bus, vehicular, or basically never never climb it. At the time of the hike we assumed that it was just common for mountain folk to climb the mountains. Madga confirmed that we had been fooled by our leader.
Over all we hiked 10 miles and were gone from 10 am to 4 pm. When you hike for that long there are lots of thoughts that go through your mind when you are not mentally prepared. First is I can do this, then it's I'm going to need a break, then I can't do this, I might die, I might throw myself off this mountain, I am starving, I could eat rocks, I could eat grass, I could eat my hand, etc. The sights at the top were very beautiful but once we got to the top our trek was not over. Then we walked down the other side of the mountain from where we started and eventually got to a spot where we could see Milan, Italy from across a lake. We walked all through small towns to catch a bus (which we almost missed and would have added an extra hour to our trip back to Lugano.) Just to give you an idea of how hard the hike was, several people did not make it an one person puked... just sayin.
The rest of the day I spent eating, stretching, and sleeping. Here are some shots of while I was still functioning.
 |
| The vehicular path and the stairs we walked on instead with a view of Lugano. |
 |
| Some girls and me on top of the mountain. |
 |
| Go Swiss! |
 |
| Don't let the smile fool you... we still had 5 miles to go. |
Just as a personal note for myself the name of the mountain was
Mt. San-Salvatore, Marcote
Did you guys have food?!
ReplyDeleteHahah noo our instructor didn't tell us what we were doing so I ate a half a bowl of oatmeal before we left!
ReplyDeleteI think my blood sugar would have dropped so low I would have passed out. Amazing that you made it!
ReplyDelete