Swiss Jura, 14 July. First evening in the Sprinter.
We're parked outside Val-de-Travers because the weather decided so. A diagnostic LED on the heater's display is on; we don't yet know what it means. We don't yet know the van either — we've only had it for a few days. That's the test: whether we want to learn it.
The Sprinter isn't ours. La Strada has lent it to us for these two weeks, and we are checking it the way you check a tool you might want to buy. A panel-van build with the typical La Strada interior — wood, upholstered seating, a galley that works the way well-engineered tools work. Behind us are over ten years with a motorhome — the routines, the maps with the good pitches marked, the comfort that comes with all of it. Before that: camping as a child, a long pause, the return.
What we wanted to leave behind was the system: barrier, check-in, allocated parcel, site rules. We wanted to decide for ourselves where we stand and what we do. The question was: how much van does that take?
Ahead lie two weeks — and the answer. It won't show tonight. It will spread itself across the passes, across the pitches, across the second hour of rain above Filisur and the first hour of sun on the Chiemsee. It will dissolve into details we hadn't thought important before: how the water tank sounds when it's half empty. How far the bed reaches, without anyone moving anything. How long the heater takes for its LED to turn green.
It keeps raining. The LED stays yellow. We have thirteen days.
Switzerland, 15 July. Crossing.
We leave at five forty because the day will be long. In the motorhome we'd have waited — for reception, the barrier, someone. In the Sprinter we get in and drive. Val-de-Travers lies in half-light. No one on the street, no barrier, no sign-in book. We come out of the van, close the door, drive.
Through the morning we roll east. Bern arrives, Thun arrives, the Thunersee arrives. In the early afternoon we turn off at Spiez and follow the Aare into the Haslital. The Sprinter pulls into the climb. Diesel revs at 2,500, fourth gear, then third. The road to Innertkirchen is tight but the van fits — just. We learn the turning circle the way you learn a city you don't know: in the narrow stretches before the tunnels, opposite the bus stops, at the hairpins with three vehicles coming the other way.
The Grimsel has a blue reservoir at the top. We stop briefly, take the photo, drive on. An hour later, the Furka — higher than the Grimsel, barer, with a view in every direction. From the Furka we head back into the Haslital. At 18:16 we're in Guttannen, a village right below the Grimsel. The heater runs on two because despite the summer it has turned cold.
We eat sparingly and sleep early. Outside the window it's quiet — no neighbour in a caravan, no barrier, no log to sign. Only a stream you can hear when you leave the side door cracked open.
Guttannen, 16 July. Late morning.
We wake late because no one wakes us. The Aare sounds like steady breathing outside. The heater's LED has been off for a while; inside the Sprinter it's seventeen degrees. Breakfast is bread, cheese, coffee — we've done this for years in the motorhome; here it's tighter, but it works.
Around eleven we take a few steps through the village. Guttannen is small — a handful of houses along the main road, a church, the stream. We walk to the end of the buildings and back. No one asks us anything. No one shows us a pitch.
At midday we move on. No five forty today, no agenda — only a destination: the Ruinaulta. The gorge of the Vorderrhein, somewhere between Ilanz and Reichenau. We drive over the Sustenpass and the Oberalp and through the Surselva without stopping. It is 130 kilometres to the gorge. We take them without a break.
Il Spir, late afternoon.
From the car park at Conn it's ten minutes on foot. A platform of steel and timber jutting over the edge. Walk to the end and the gorge is straight down.
The Vorderrhein turns below. Turquoise, sometimes grey, because the weather changed just before we arrived. On the scree cones single pines stand like markers — high point one, high point two, high point three. The sound of the gorge isn't one, it's several: the river far below, the wind in the pines, your own breathing, which you notice up here. We stand for three minutes. Maybe four. We don't talk.
This gorge is still young. Nine thousand years ago half a mountain came down here, several billion cubic metres of rock, and the river has been cutting through since. We only know that because it says so on the sign at the start of the path. Three exposures from the same point — wide, tele, one with the platform in the foreground. None of them will carry it.
We walk back to the Sprinter. Filisur lies an hour east, in the Albula valley. We arrive in rain.
Davos, 17 July. Rain.
Filisur was only an overnight — a pitch by the station, quieter than expected. In the morning we drive to Davos, twenty-one kilometres of the Albula. It's been raining since last night. In Davos we park, buy bread and cheese, walk along the lake back to the van. We talk about the bed.
It isn't the comfort that's missing — we're reduced enough for that to work. It's the geometry. The Sprinter has a transverse bed, just under two metres, but tighter than what we had in the motorhome. We lie at an angle, each in our own way. One night was fine, two was fine. Tonight is the fourth. We note it, drive on.
At the Albulapass the weather flips. Clouds break, the mountains look suddenly different — black in shadow, bright in the remaining sun, with that change you recognise when the air goes dry. Down into the Engadin. Silvaplana lies on a lake, a pale-green entrance into another Switzerland. We stay two nights because the place asks for them: a small watersport harbour, a bakery, a tucked-in pitch behind the campsite that isn't official and that no one insists on.
On the third morning we drive northeast. The summer is back, and with it the question of how long we can stand the bed.
Chiemsee, 20 July. Stand day.
After the passes we're flat. The Chiemsee has another quality — the mountains far back, the water wide, the trip suddenly out of motion. The pitch beside the campsite isn't quite as free as we'd hoped. But no one says anything, and that's enough.
We stay six days. We cook, read, swim, write postcards we don't send. It's high summer, twenty-six degrees, the silence is wide. Inside the Sprinter it becomes clear where its limits are — the bed, the bathroom, the narrow table that doesn't seat the two of us for long. We know now what we don't want.
On the third evening, swimming, a smell comes back I haven't had in thirty years — the plastic of an air mattress left too long in the sun. I can't say where it surfaces from, but suddenly it's there. That's how childhood returns: not as image but as smell, half forgotten.
On 21 July I take no photograph. I only noticed later, going through the files — a gap between the previous evening's sunset and the morning fog after. I don't remember what that day was. Probably nothing. As a child a day without an act would have unsettled me. Not today.
On 25 July we pack. Six days of standing, twenty-six degrees, no photograph of 21 July. We take the A8 west, in no hurry.
Black Forest, 26 July. Penultimate pitch.
From Bavaria into Baden, via the motorway. We stop in the Black Forest. The pitch isn't really a pitch, it's a parking bay on a B-road, half shaded, quiet. We stay one night.
Here, in a stopped van by the roadside, we take stock. Three columns: what we've learned, what we didn't want, what we wanted.
Learned: that leaving the system works. The barrier missing, the check-in missing, no one pointing us at a pitch. No one missing us either.
Didn't want: the bed too small, the bathroom too tight, the table too short for two. The Sprinter is well built; the van isn't the problem. We are the problem for the van.
Wanted: more van for the same freedom. That's an optimisation with two variables, and we now know one of them. The other will be answered on the next trip with the next candidate — no pressure, no date.
On 27 July we return the van. A staff member checks the water tank, signs the form, shakes our hands. We've lived for thirteen days where we wanted. We know now what doesn't fit. What does, we don't yet know.