Watercolour and oil pastel
©2019 Charlene Brown
When my husband retired from Emirates Airline
in 2000, we picked up a new car in Sweden and drove around Europe for two
months. Half-way through this Grand Tour,
we crossed from Italy into France. The following is excerpted from email we sent at the time.
As we made our way west, then north from Turin, it was
like driving up out of a mauve sea of murk. The air got suddenly clearer, the
highway got better and better, and the traffic got thinner and thinner. It was
just amazing!
Then we discovered when we wheeled off our private
autostrada for lunch at Morgex that we were probably the only people in Europe
who didn’t know the Mont Blanc Tunnel was still closed because of the March 1999 fire. The closest alternate route
involved heading up a narrow road to the Petit St. Bernard Pass, said to be
open at the time, though not guaranteed to stay that way. As we approached the Italian/French border at
the top of the pass, stretches of the road were carved out of three-metre snow banks,
but the gentians and violas in the snow-free areas were brilliant, the glaciers
dazzling, and there were (unsurprisingly) NO TRUCKS! Also no guardrails.
PS We’re still
driving that Volvo. And we still refer to it as our new car.
