In the Fall of 1983 I departed Norway with the intention of eventually meeting up with my friend, Monica who lived in Barcelona, Spain. Per arranged for me to ride with a semi-truck driver from Norway to Southern, Germany. I don’t recall all of the details now but we made it through Denmark and to Southern Germany near the Black Forest, Schwarzwald. It is an incredibly picturesque area, but for somebody from the Northwest it is not what we think of as forest.
The villages in the area are idyllic and my first nights were camping in my very small tent along Boden See, which in English we call it Lake Constance. The area has wonderful sausage and cheese, so I ate a lot of that. One of the nights was an extreme lightning, thunder and rainstorm. The tent would light up with each lightning strike. There were many windsurfers on the lake during the day. The area is unique in that at the end of the lake, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein all meet. I will have to go back to my journals some day, but I could cross the borders easily on foot. At the time I thought that was pretty cool. I stayed in Liechtenstein at the hostel a couple of nights if I recall correctly, then hitch-hiked into Switzerland. in Switzerland their were zones that spoke German, zones that spoke French and also a zone for Italian. Romansch was also considered a fourth national language. I remember reading the languages on the sewage coverings in the street. The area I was entering spoke what was referred to as, “Svitsah dooch,” or Swiss German. Pronunciation was quite different and words as well. There is a beautiful lake called Walen See and I entered the town on the shores of the lake. It was called, Walenstadt. I was already fatigued of the road again. I saw a sign on an office that looked like an employment bureau. I went in and asked if there were any jobs for people like me. He said, “no,” but I persisted and said I would do anything and didn’t need to make a lot of money. He made a couple of calls and told me to wait. Soon, a Swiss dairy farmer pulled up in front of the building. Soon we were back at his dairy farm in the village of Flums below the Swiss Alps. More on that in the next entry.
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