Jamie’s Travels

Verona to Sierre Switzerland is not a quick or direct route. Five different trains over about eight hours was not an amazing way to spend a day but we made do. Frequent stops in the odd spot meant that we could do things in the day as well.

Our first longer stop was Novara. A city in the state next to Milan. Here we went to the local supermarket and scanned lots of wine bottles with a wine app to find a nice one to take Andy. Me and Lawrence are now both certified wine snobs.

Another few hours of trains took us to Brig. We thought we might hang out in Brig for a while. It’s a very pretty place but very expensive and with not much to do. It is incredible to look at though. We grabbed some pasta sauce and headed to our final destination – Sierre. Sierre is an industrial city near Brig where we managed to find a ‘cheap’ Airbnb.

The Airbnb was in the middle of the mountains. Our host was nice enough to come and pick us up from the station once he found out we were travelling by train. The room he gave us was like a hotel room. A little room with an en suite attached to his house. This meant we didn’t have a kitchen… a big issue since the closest restaurant was 25 CHF for their cheapest meal.

We went for a walk around the area. It’s a part of France full of Vineyards. It’s really pretty and I’m glad to have spent a night there.

When we returned to the room we decided to get creative with cooking. We had a kettle and we had pasta. It turns out that cooking pasta in a kettle is not too difficult a task. As much as the internet articles seem to diminish people that try it, it’s a very effective way to cook. If you’re ever in s bind – give it a go. The trick is to not let it boil over by turning the kettle on and off frequently. To keep a rolling boil you would need to limit the power from the kettle. The website I found suggested adding diode in the circuit – surprisingly we didn’t have one to hand though.

After a lovely meal of kettle pasta and cold sauce we relaxed for a bit before heading to sleep. In the morning we hiked down to the bus stop and caught our train over to Les Houches.