9/3 2020 Bottingen, Baden Württenberg Germany

This is one of the most coronavirus infected areas of Germany, we didn’t know when we booked my cozy Gasthaus for this night.

Yes, I run away. I run away from my beloved mountains. MY mountains, why did you come and infested the purity of this, my childhood place with your sticky fingers Covid19? Why so many people this weekend, coming up to the mountains to ski as usual? Why don’t you stay at home? I know you have the RIGHT to come to your second house in the mountains, but you have also DUTIES as citizen: to stay at home (your first) when the crisis is evident as it is now. In Italy.

Today more than 9000 cases in Italy.

I think about my neighbor Massimo in the tiny village of Palouettaz, near the bigger but still tiny village of Champoluc, where we have the privilege of having Thealpstugan. He is 82 and lives alone. With 2 cats. Ah and hens. He feels powerless and alone, more than usual. Why should you come from Milan and threaten his health driving from the - what it is now - orange areas in Italy to these tiny villages? Who is to blame? Not Massimo for sure. Perhaps the ski systems, the industry that makes you abandon your polluted or infected city to get to a new polluted and infected area, but with a ski system? I have never seen so many cars in our villages as this weekend. All coming from Milan to ski – and leave the bad dream of Covid19 behind.

So I quit and leave. And I know that I am a part of the industry.

What is the best way to take you to Sweden from Italy in the era of the pandemic? We reasoned in my family and this is the result:

Two major parameters: 

• Civil duty – try not to spread the virus. 
• Come home safe – and fast, we need you.

The means:

• Take the car and drive. 
• Take your pillow and all the disinfectants you can. 
• Buy gloves to tank the car. 
• Do not pie. 
• Cook your food on a camping gas.

So now I am on my way.

First it was a tragedy to leave the purity of my mountains (the paragraphs above are what I thought driving the firs couple of kilometers from Thealpsstugan). Then there was the thrill of passing the frontier to Switerland. Should they ask me where I was from? What should I say? Milan? Lombardia? I am after all born in that incredible city! Tell them that I am running away and that they should do the same?

At the great Saint Bernhard Tunnel, the border, I was completely alone. Only the little man at the Italian cashier to get me pay the toll. No cars, no police, no other migrants as me. Nothing! I had not even to pay for the terrific “vignette”, the toll for the Swiss motorways that you pay when you get into the country usually. Nothing!

So now I am free. Just in another country in Europe with increasing and rising numbers of Covid19. They had a very good Wiener schnitzel anyway, and home made knödel at Landgasthof Rebstock in Bottingen.