Ali- A month ago we had Andreas and his family (Yana, Paulo and Mateo) over for dinner. You may recall from a past blog post that Andreas is the nephrologist here who pays most of my Swiss salary. You may also recall he’s not one for long term planning and detailed instruction (see post on how to break into a Swiss Chalet).
So during dinner it came out that the Abrahams had not spent any time in the Italian section of Switzerland. Andreas, being of Italian origins, has a soft spot for the area and had a line on a little cabin of some sort somewhere near Lugano or Locarno or ??? Details were fuzzy. So we made a tentative plan to all go for the weekend of the 13th-14th May.
Flash forward and it’s the Monday before this penciled-in trip. I email Andreas asking for the probability that we are actually going and my email goes into an email black hole….no reply. Sooooo I figured we were not going and had started to look at some hiking options. Thursday 10pm my phone buzzes and it’s a text from Andreas saying “Friday we will go to Tessin! Hope you are ready!”
Tessin? Errrr ok. Where the heck is Tessin? We look up trains to wherever Tessin is and the SBB app tells us that it will take us 11 hours to get there on Friday night. So here I’ll just cut to punch line. After Andreas makes fun of us for 5 minutes via text, it turns out Tessin is the Canton (think State) and not the city 
and says we should just meet him at the train station because clearly we can’t be trusted to navigate around Switzerland on our own. I’ve added the actual texts so you can get a sense of the Swiss superiority. He also sends a picture of what he’s packing… all climbing equipment. 
That’s right. He’s taking the formerly active and sporty, now aged and decrepit Abrahams climbing. I, of course, respond with a picture of what my plan for the weekend was: wine and Harry Potter auf Deutsch. I was planning to exercise…. my liver and left hemisphere of my brain.
Maya had big plans for the weekend as well, which involved hanging out with her buddies in Zurich. She took the news that we were going away with the Serras with angry disappointment and then resignation. Her main problem was that both Mateo (age 8) and Paulo (age 6) speak only German, and her confidence in her German had yet to fully blossom.
So Friday night we all meet at the train station for a 3 hour ride to Locarno (turns out Lugano was another red herring direction from Andreas, who proceeded to use the two city names interchangeably for the rest of the trip). We arrive in Locarno and pile in a rented SUV for the 20 minute drive to a random road side parking spot next to a crazy bridge across a river.
After a 10 minute hike we arrive at a cabin in the middle of nowhere backing up to a huge cliff face. 
Morning comes and we discover that there is no coffee bean grinder in the cabin with which to grind our whole bean coffee. After considering a cheese grater and a motar and pestle, we decide to walk back out to the car and head down the road to a campground where they have coffee and breakfast.
There are tons of independent camp ground all over Switzerland highly reminiscent of KOAs in the US. This campground featured both miniput and ping-pong tables.
Surprisingly the lure of miniput and coffee was far stronger than the lure of a cliff face, and we ended up spending the morning slurping capachinos rather than getting our climb on. Another thing happened at miniput. Maya discovered she was perfectly well equipped to communicate with Mateo in German. So just to give you some time reference here, in 10 months Maya has gone from zero German language skills to fully able to communicate, though it took a situation of no other communication option for her to fully realize it.
Ok it’s noon and we are back at the cabin and out of excuses for not climbing. So we gathered up gear and walked all of 3 minutes to the cliff. At this point I discovered that the kind of climbing that at least one fully expendable person would be doing is lead climbing. I’m putting a link to a helpful you-tube video with tips for lead climbing that I did not watch before lead-climbing. Luckily 8 year old Mateo is the first climber and is therefore the one putting in the anchors that the rest of us will rely on to keep from plummeting to our deaths. Joe is designated as the belayer, a job he is qualified for only because Mateo weighs so little one can just hold the rope without any use of equipement or proper technique.
Maya goes up next and makes a good start of it.
However, coming down can be more disconcerting than going up, as one is completely at the mercy of your less than perfectly qualified belayer. Andreas had to go up and get her when she decided that staying up on the rock was a long term solution to Joe’s questionable qualifications as a belayer.
Joe took a turn. Luckily photos don’t capture all the complaining and limb tremors so he just looks cool.
When everyone was pooped we headed the 3 minutes back to the cabin for playing in the tall grassy meadow.
Hmmm tall grass. I feel like there’s something I should be watching for when playing in tall grass. Ah whatever. Another beer anyone?
So the next morning was more climbing but now with sore muscles and the anemia that follows a full night of several ticks sucking your blood. 
I don’t have any pictures of me climbing, because I needed my hands and Joe refuses to participate in the blogging at this point, but that leaves me free to tell you all about my lead climbing awesomeness without any contradiction from visual evidence. Trust me. I was awesome. And I only wet my climbing shorts during a couple hard spots.
Well all good things must come to an end. After a morning of climbing we headed out. The Serras took us to one of their favorite spots called the America.
Here we got some Italian sodas and Joe showed off his muscles to a couple of female climbers at the next table.
Ok ok. He was showing them his tick head that was still imbedded in his bicep but ignore that and just let the picture speak for itself.
Then we made our way back to the train station for the ride home. I end this post with the best ‘fart’ sign I have seen. It’s the German word for Drive but that doesn’t keep it from being funny to crass Americans. Gute Fahrt! 