Valhalla’s Things: And now for something completely different

A lot of the youtube channels I follow tend to involve somebody making
things, so of course one of the videos my SO and I watched a few days
ago was about walking around San Francisco Bay, and that recalled my
desire to go to places by foot. Now, for health-related reasons doing it
properly would be problematic, and thus I’ve never trained for that, but
during this Christmas holiday-heavy time I suggested my very patient
SO the next best thing: instead of our usual 1.5 hours uphill walk in
the woods, a 2 hours and a bit mostly flat walk on paved streets, plus
some train, to a nearby town: Porto Ceresio, on the Italian side of Lake
Lugano.

I started to prepare for it on the day before, by deciding it was a good
time to upgrade my PinePhone, and wait, I’m still on Trixie? I could
try Forky, what could possibly go wrong? And well, the phone was no
longer able to boot, and reinstalling from the latest weekly had a
system where the on-screen keyboard didn’t appear, and I didn’t want to
bother finding out why, so re-installed another time from the 13.0
image, and between that, and distracting myself with widelands while
waiting for the downloads and uploads and reboots etc., well, all of the
afternoon and the best part of the evening disappeared.

So, in a hurry, between the evening and the next morning I prepared a
nice healthy lunch, full of all the important nutrients such as sugar,
salt, mercury and arsenic. Tuna (mercury) soboro (sugar and salt) on
rice and since I was in a hurry I didn’t prepare any vegetables, but
used pickles (more salt) and shio kombu (arsenic and various heavy
metals, sugar and salt). Plus a green tea mochi for dessert, in case
we felt low on sugar. 😀

Then on the day of the walk we woke up a bit later than usual, and then
my body decided it was a good day for my belly to not exactly hurt, but
not not-hurt either, and there I took an executive decision to wear a
corset, because if something feels like it wants to burst open, wrapping
it in a steel reinforced cage will make it stop. (I’m not joking. It
does. At least in those specific circumstances.)

This was followed by hurrying through the things I had to do before
leaving the house, having a brief anxiety attack and feeling feverish
(it wasn’t fever), and finally being able to leave the house just half
an hour late.

And then, 10 minutes after we had left, realizing that I had written
down the password for the train website, since it was no longer saved on
the phone, but i had forgotten the bit of paper at home. We could have
gone back to take it, but decided not to bother, as we could also
hopefully buy paper-ish tickets at the train station (we could).

Later on, I also realized I had also forgotten my GPS tracker, so I have
no record of where we went exactly (but it’s not hard to recognize it on
a map) nor on what the temperature was. It’s a shame, but by that point
it was way too late to go back.

Anyway, that probably was when Murphy felt we had paid our respects, and
from then on everything went lovingly well!

Routing had been done on the OpenStreetMap website, with OSRM, and it
looked pretty easy to follow, but we also had access to an Android
phone, so we used OSMAnd to check that we were still on track. It tried
to lead us to the Statale (i.e. most important and most trafficked road)
a few times, but we ignored it, and after a few turns and a few changes
of the precise destination point we managed to get it to cooperate.

At one point a helpful person asked us if we needed help, having seen us
looking at the phone, and gave us indication for the next fork (that way
to Cuasso al Piano, that way to Porto Ceresio), but it was pretty easy,
since the way was clearly marked also for cars.

Then we started to notice red and white markings on poles and other
places, and on the next fork there was a signpost for hiking routes with
our destination and we decided to follow it instead of the sign for
cars. I knew that from our starting point to or destination there was
also a hiking route, uphill both ways 🙂 , through the hills, about 5 or 6
hours instead of two, but the sign was pointing downhill and we were
past the point where we would expect too long of a detour.

And indeed, after a short while the paved road ended, but the path
continued on a wide and flat track, and was a welcome detour through
what looked like water works to prevent flood damage from a stream.
In a warmer season, with longer grass and ticks maybe the fact that I
was wearing a long skirt may have been an issue, but in winter it was
just fine.

And soon afterwards, we were in Porto Ceresio. I think I have been there
as a child, but I had no memory of it. On the other hand, it was about
as I expected: a tiny town with a lakeside street full of houses built
in the early 1900s when the area was an important tourism destination,
with older buildings a bit higher up on the hills (because streams
in this area will flood). And of course, getting there by foot rather
than by train we also saw the parts where real people live (but not
work: that’s cross-border commuters country).

Soon after arriving in Porto Ceresio we stopped to eat our lunch on a
bench at the lakeside; up to then we had been pretty comfortable in the
clothing we had decided to wear: there was plenty of frost on the
ground, in the shade, but the sun was warm and the temperatures were
cleanly above freezing. Removing the gloves to eat, however, resulted in
quite cold hands, and we didn’t want to stay still for longer than
strictly necessary.

So we spent another hour and a bit walking around Porto Ceresio like
proper tourists and taking pictures. There was an exhibition of nativity
scenes all around the streets, but to get a map one had to go to either
facebook or instagram, or wait for the opening hours of an office that
were later than the train we planned to get to go back home, so we only
saw maybe half of them, as we walked around: some were quite nice, some
were nativity scenes, and some showed that the school children must have
had some fun making them.

Another Christmas decoration were groups of creatures made of evergreen
branches that dotted the sidewalks around the lake: I took pictures of
the first couple of groups, and then after seeing a few more something
clicked in my brain, and I noticed that they were wrapped in green LED
strings, like chains, and they had a red ball that was supposed to be
the nose, but could just be around the mouth area, and suddenly I felt
the need to play a certain chord to release them,
but sadly I didn’t have a weaponized guitar on me 😀

Another thing that we noticed were some benches in the shape of books,
with book quotations on them; most were on reading-related topics, but
the one with the Constitution felt worth taking a picture of, especially
these days.

And then, our train was waiting at the station, and we had to go back
home for the afternoon; it was a nice outing, if a bit brief, and we
agreed to do it again, possibly with a bit of a detour to make the walk
a bit longer. And then maybe one day we’ll train to do the whole 5-6
hour thing through the hills.