Isn't it Romanshic?

We just got back from an extended weekend in a house on a mountainside outside the little village of Tschierv, which is in the southeastern part of Switzerland. If you're thinking that the name "Tschierv" doesn't sound like German, French, or Italian, you're right. In that part of Switzerland, the primary language is Romansh, which is Switzerland's fourth official language. My research shows that at most, it's spoken as the primary language by somewhere less than 100,000 people, all in that little area of Switzerland.

The scenery was spectacular, of course, which is true of most of Switzerland. Here's the view from our house:

One of the coolest things was the drive there and back through the Flüela Pass. It goes from aboug 5,000 feet to 8,000 feet and back down to 4,700 feet in the space of about 13 miles. It looked like the type of road they race in the mountain stages of the Tour de France. It had nasty, nasty switchbacks that seemed to wrap around on each other. As I've mentioned before, Swiss roads generally have no shoulders, and they're not real big on guardrails, either. There weren't a lot of good places to stop for pictures, but I tried to capture one set of switchbacks in this picture:

It made Utah's Alpine Loop look like a cakewalk.

One interesting thing about Switzerland, or most of Europe, I suppose, is that 500 years ago, they weren't real concerned about making the roads wide enough for two cars to pass. That results in us trying to drive through something like this:

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That's a picture of the main drag through town. As you can see from the picture, there's no way two cars can coexist on that road. You just start through town, go very slowly, keep your eyes open, and prepare to scoot to the side if someone is coming from the other direction. There isn't a lot of conflict in situations like that; everyone understands that they've got to work together to make things work.

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All in all, it was a fun weekend. We were only about a mile from the Italian border, but we never managed to make it across. I'm sure we'll have another chance somewhere along the line.