St. Moritz to Stresa to Zermatt

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Bags out by 6:45am, breakfast at 6:30am, bus departed at 7:30am. Very quickly after leaving St. Moritz, we started winding down the Maloja Pass. The only reason I know that is it is written on our itinerary and Stephane stopped his reading from Heidi because he was getting motion sick and the driver told him to give us the name. I have hotlinked it and you can learn more about what we saw the same way I did.

We crossed the border into Italy with a pee break at a weird gas station/cookie outlet off the highway at Mandello del Lario. It sat beside Lake Como which was the 2nd lake we'd driven beside. It was mostly tunnel driving along Lake Como though. Our 3rd Italian Lake was Maggiore and our target was Stresa. It was a hot and sunny day so that was good news/bad news. We arrived around noon. Stephane led us from the lakeside bus drop to a town square and showed us the best gelato spot, L'Angolo del gelato.

Stephane lead an optional tour by boat to Isola Bella for a couple of hours. Mom & Carol went and the Clay & I had a couple free hours after lunch to wander and tablesit. We did some shopping here. Good thing since the prices in Switzerland have doubled! We departed at 3:30pm. Stephane started showing the movie Life is Beautiful. It is in Italian with English subtitles, so you really have to pay attention. Outside the scenery was otherworldly. We had finally reached the big Alps. We crossed the Simplon Pass. Stephane announced it when he had to pause the movie for our pee break at Monte Leone. Some of the most spectacular scenery in a drive on Earth and most everyone was closely watching a movie! About an hour later, we arrived in Tasch where we had to leave the bus for a day. We got all our hand luggage and our bus drivers and others moved all our checked bags to 9 passenger vans. We drove less than 15 minutes I would say to a parking garage in Zermatt. Happily, the top of the Matterhorn was visible! What a relief since seeing it was our reason for picking this particular tour. If all else fails, we've seen it. In the parking garage, we unloaded and our luggage was unloaded where I watched our van driver drag the end of my rolling duffel across the drive and rip the zipper apart. Mom's suitcase had the top handle ripped off about 4 days ago. Good news neither will be a huge financial loss, we just both hope our bags last intact to hold our stuff until we get home.

We had a short period to get into our rooms and claim our luggage before we had to meet outside for our Trafalgar tour group photo. Immediately from there we walked a couple blocks to sister property Mont Cervin Palace for an included dinner.. It was served course by course which was an improvement over the previous night's open public buffet. Dinner was at 7:30pm and it was after 9:30pm before we got back to the room. That explains why I am a day late posting this!

Our room at the Monte Rosa Hotel is fantastic! Glad to be here for 2 nights. Our one complaint would be the noise. As it has no AC, you have to open the windows and the bars and restaurants outside were noisy until after 1am.

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