Friday 16th September – Perhaps plan C will work

Following our few days in Lake Maggiore it is proposed that we go to a place near Zurich to meet up with Noels ex-boss and then if timer permitted other people Noel met in the course of his business life.

We needed to find a Hotel which we thought in September would be easy but this was not the case as Hotel after Hotel was full and what with the Swiss Franc to Sterling exchange rate being so high, a two star hotel was going to cost about £150.00 per night which is far to high but camping is out of the question as the nearest camp site is miles away.

In discussion with another ex-business colleague we nearly almost had it sorted at still huge expense when Noels ex-boss phoned to say he was having to travel and could not make it and perhaps they would come to London instead during the next few months unless we were visiting Asia where we should stay with them in their house in Phuket, Thailand.  Oh well back to the drawing board and let’s look at plan C.

It was also at this point that we discovered that some of the emails we though had been sent had not been sent and as some of these covered our future travel plans this was frustrating. As usual when purchasing access to the internet Wifi at the camp you had to show your passport??

And the process was also stupid, you had to enter a number on your browser including your mobile phone number and they would text you the acces codes. So I waited and no text arrived and so I trtied logging on again and was rejected as quote this reference number already in use. The reply also gave a telephone number to call should you not get the text and so I called this number only to find they had printed the wrong number but after retruning to reception anc complaining and then the receptionist spent ten minutes on the PC to extract the codes and all this

this took almost thrity minutes AND it was costing 13 Euros for four hours.

The rest of the day was spent relaxing and recovering from internet woes and also finalising the rest of our trip details. Dinner was chicken salad and it was really good.