Leaving Liechtenstein for Heidiland

Slow-moving again this morn­ing due to my cold and the kind hos­pi­tal­ity of Catha­rina and Hartwig, we finally got out of their house at 10 and then put­tered around in Vaduz for another hour, find­ing the gro­cery store and the post office and tak­ing in the cap­i­tal sights… an hour was really quite ade­quate. There are indeed a lot of banks in Liecht­en­stein that you’ve never heard of. The city was mostly modern—the roman­tic image of a medieval prin­ci­pal­ity was def­i­nitely busted there—even with ugly apart­ment block high rises and plots aspir­ing toward the out­let mall aes­thetic. Appar­ently there wasn’t much of any­thing in Vaduz at all until after the Sec­ond World War. And all of Liecht­en­stein is basi­cally just 11 vil­lages. The other vil­lages are pretty charm­ing, though, scal­ing far up the enor­mous moun­tain that looms over the coun­try to the east. Farm­houses sit under the shadow of huge cliffs.

We avoided the Rhine canal as long as we could, actu­ally long­ing for some shade inter­spersed with the bril­liant sun! When we did finally recon­nect we had an excit­ing scram­ble first over the rocks in the Rhine itself and then up the nearly sheer hill­side to the nar­row path that finally came out on the other side… we think in Switzer­land. The fact is we were never quite sure when we came into Switzer­land because the bor­der wasn’t marked at all. There was a bunker tucked back away in the woods; maybe that was it. Any­way, the point is that we are def­i­nitely in Switzer­land now, coun­try #4 out of 5. We’ll be here for another 5 days or so.

We stopped for “sec­ond lunch” (fre­quently eat­ing hobbit-style these days; my first week of nau­sea and van­ished appetite has given way to a hunger that would make Bilbo proud—tomorrow is his birth­day, by the way) over­look­ing the canal and there made the fas­ci­nat­ing dis­cov­ery that the source of dis­tress on my feet were two of the most enor­mous blis­ters ever seen. We had traded out my sneaker san­dals for reg­u­lar sneak­ers for this stretch in the moun­tains, fig­ur­ing they’d offer more pro­tec­tion for alpine explo­ration and pos­si­ble snow. But we never though to con­sider how I’d do wear­ing them all day for days on end—I have only used them for run­ning before. Now we know all too well. I man­aged all right till the end of the day’s walk but then Andrew had the unpleas­ant duty of lanc­ing and ban­dag­ing these minor mon­u­ments; he bore it well. Between the blis­ters and a bug bite that feels like a but­ton lodged under my skin and an episode of stag­ger­ing stu­pid­ity in which I attempted to drain the oil out of a pack­age of sun-dried toma­toes while stand­ing down­wind in a stiff breeze lead­ing to polka-dotted stains all over my one and only pair of pants, it has not been a day rank­ing high in either com­fort or style. For­tu­nately, that is not the point of a pilgrimage.

Evening (which begins at 5:45 p.m. when the sun dis­ap­pears behind the moun­tain) brought us to Bad Ragaz, a Swiss spa town in “Hei­di­land.” They really call it that. Heidi takes place partly in neigh­bor­ing Maien­feld. It is in fact an extremely pious book, though I doubt that fea­tures sig­nif­i­cantly in the tourist pack­ages. Between Heidi and ski­ing, the prices have ascended in direct pro­por­tion to the alti­tude of the Alps. I’m suf­fer­ing from per­pet­ual sticker shock. Another thing Luther wouldn’t have had to worry about!