OT: Back

Actually, I might be wrong about the time in advance, someone else mentioned 72 hours. Esta,

Dept details.

At least 72 hours, AFAIK.

Yeuch.

Yeuch.

Fast section of autobahn but many speed traps and pitfalls for the unwary then when you get to Lörach you join the fecking huge queue.

Another queue for the tunnel, potentially some hours if you get it wrong.

You still won't get there before 1900, if you're lucky. Go through France and admittedly you have to pay the toll(s) but you'll be in Italy (Bardonecchia) at 17:00 from an 08:00 arrival in France.

Not to mention the 40 Swiss Francs for the privilege of travelling on Swiss motorways at 120 km/h.

But not bad road wise and pretty straightforward

Hit it at night. Always.

You have to pay to drive through switzerland don't you too? Never had bad queues for the Gotthard.

Indeed, but I spend £180 for that privilege in the UK.

But in fairness to the British road system, that is a one year unlimited pass. Except for the M6 Toll, Humber Bridge and loads of other toll bridges.

Same in Switzerland.

Yes, but much less than to cross via the Mont Blanc or Frejus tunnels.

Coo, you've been lucky.

Actually you don't have to do it 72 hours in advance, you can do it on the day or while your at the airport :)

Infact you don't even have to do it yourself, for example a handling agent could do it for you as long as they have the information needed :) oh and I think you still need to fill in the card on the plane, this is a sort of supplement of the VWP.

Slough is currently top of my personal list of places I don't want to ever have to go to again.

Aye the CoooperS would probably have been just hated by the time we got home heh. Both of my mates are 6ft and 15stone sort've guys - one's fat, one's a giant brick. The boot would've been tight as well, once we got the box of stuff that we needed for all the foreign countries, like the hi-viz vests, triangle, first aid kit etc etc - loads of shit anyway that would've filled half the Mini boot before we even considered clothes for a week for 3...

We went through there I think, the name sounds familiar... There was a queue of a couple of cars but nothing major, asssuming we're talking about the same place. I think it was like, 2pm sort've time though so presumably everyone would be at work or whatever.

Sorry I don't really get what do you mean? The cameras looked different to the UK ones - none seemed to be gatsos or truvelos etc. They were like, fat cubes with yellow an black lines on mostly, then some others that were a bit different. They sure looked like they had lenses and stuff though so sure as hell looked like cameras heh - I'm not sure if we saw any signs, I really can't remember. There's a lot of video camera footage of the trip I could have a look on actually 'cos we filmed a couple of the salutes hehe :-)

We totted my costs once, based on the drugs prices (we knew most of them by the end from the £8 a pop tablets[1] to the £4k bags of Methatrexate), the cost of surgeon and crew working on you for however many hours, x-rays/scans, the metal knee (that was £8k), Radiotherapy, bandages/dressings for the surgery wounds and for the radio therapy burn, Oncology wards 'rental' price for when a private place sends a patient in, they charge them so much per night, or a patient from another health authority I think, there was a price anyway heh, and they said add another

50% on per night for anytime I'd been in an HDU/ICU....

Anyway, there was more I've forgot to mention there I think, but we came to about £600,000 :-) I guess I could add this bed, this air mattress, the district nurse time, the sores dressings and the heaps of Morphine and Sevredol I chomp down every day....

[1] When I was first diagnosed, and first had chemo, it made me really sick and one of the pills, the Dextramethozone (sp?) was £8 a tablet, and I wanted 3 a day for a month. My GP had to fill this order once, and despite I was only 13 years old, and the only kid in the village (please don't make a crap only gay in the village joke Pete) of under 2,000 people that was having cancer treatment and was also suffering with it very badly he phoned my mum and asked if I really needed them, or could I get by without them as they were expensive and ate into his budget... Mum was too stunned to really tell him where to get off, but she said he must've suddenly twigged how wrong that was cos he started apologising and trying to change the subject heh. Of course, he still didn't actually bother to come to the house to check me over, even though it was 1 minute drive, tops, about 400m.

We told my consultant at Leeds this and he was disgusted, and said he'd find us some much more expensive drugs next time. We also found later he'd phoned the GP and given him a mouthful about patient care, and if he disagreed with the prescription he should take it up with him, not my mum hehe :-)

You probably did, it's the road from Basel to Lake Como passing Luzern and Lugano.

I you get there at some times of day the queue can reach all the way to Stans which is a long way to the north. Then they do a cute trick of stopping cars letting a few trucks through and then a few cars etc. The queues can be up to two hours long.

That's not entirely true. Whilst I admit the food in Vegas was, well 'plentiful' and of course nothing special, but none of us threw up after eating it and there was a truely massive choice, with actually surprisingly good and no doubt irradiated and grown in a GM lab, salads. It went that the more a hotel cost per night, the better the food was.

However, the food, especially the seafood, in Anchorage and everywhere we went in Alaska was just amazing. The sheer range of very fresh, locally caught seafood was just bewildering at first heh! Some of the salmon dishes just re-arranged my brain for thoughts of what salmon tastes like. Everything was so fresh, and as it was all locally caught and there is (was?) plentiful supplies it wasn't that pricey, the kind've near three figure sums you'd sometimes pay for a dish that wasn't half of these in flavour (and size, it's still America...) in this country was just made to look like a bad joke. I know that's purely down to local availabity though, and it wasn't all good, I mean for example I've never had a really good cup of tea anywhere in America. Plenty drinkable, but none where you let out a sigh and a smile after the first sip hehe :-p

The highlight though was the clam chowder. It made the (best clams anywhere in the world) clam chowder you get in New England look (well, taste really) like it was from a Campbell's Condensed tin. I like Campbell's tinned soups, so that's not 100% of an insult, but I can say without a shadow of a doubt that if you went to Alaska, and had been to New England and said "This clam chowder is the best in the world" - you'd change your mind instantly. Even the small road side style places seemed able to get hold of clams caught that morning to make into the afternoon and evenings chowder. God it was good...

Whilst I'm not a fan of a lot of the well known style of American food places, those with each meal just being an all you can eat buffet as I find breakfasts that fatty disagree with me, so I always ended up just getting tea and toast or something. However, there are many nice places as well. I mean, the all you can eat in the Luxor hotel in Vegas was actually very good, more expensive than most but still only $20 and had a huge range of crazy foods that were fun to try. Also, for $2.99 we got a full box of like

12 Krispy Kremes or something and I can see why America has an obescity problem because for close on £1.50 at the time for 12 of them, we had a struggle on not to just get a box each. Also, the McDonalds had prices the same as ours, but in US$, double cheese for 99c for example, and their sizes at the McD's in one of the hotels was one notch bigger than ours. So their large was our old supersize and their supersize came with a barrell to fill with coke...

Yebbut it's s**te compared to Moules or Bouillabaise and immensely s**te compared to brodo in Italy.

My reply to Mike gets most of that, it's too late for more heh :-)