I spent most of 2006 living and working in Zuerich, Switzerland on a staff exchange trip from my company in London. Whilst in Zuerich I made a few good friends, one of whom was Reto Steiner, who invited me down to Lake Como in Italy with his family for the long bank holiday weekend in early June. The drive was approx 4.5 hours from Zuerich, and passed over the alps. I traveled with Reto's sister in law and her boyfriend, they had never met me before and even made sandwich's for me for the drive. A rock fall the week before meant that one of the major passes over the alps in Italy was closed (I think it was San Bernardino?) so we had to take a much smaller crossing from fortress Switzerland. The roads were extremely windy hairpin's and I felt utterly sick by the time we reached the border post. As we crossed the Swiss border at nearly 2,000m elevation the road changed from a beautifully maintained groomed road, into an italian gravel path with rusting crash barriers, I had arrived in Italy.

We stayed on a campsite adjacent to the lake, where the Steiner's have been coming for many years each June bank holiday for windsurfing. The campsite was fairly packed out, and it seems that half of Switzerland had migrated down for the weekend. Reto and I stayed in a tent, whilst his wife, children and friends stayed in a chalet opposite. We hired some great mountain bikes (click for a cheesy photo) for a ridiculously cheap price, and cycled up the alps, literally.I was pretty close to a fairly serious head first plunge on one of our cycles, we were going downhill through towns and small villages at high speed, and then down onto a wooded roman path in the forest; I forget that when you apply the brake's, the front suspension dips, it was dodgy.

I spent the rest of the trip trying to take photo's, drinking with fellow campers, and learning about grappa and Italian ice cream parlours. I had a wonderful weekend am indebted to the Steiner's for inviting, driving and looking after me for the weekend.