“Do you have to be home now?” asked a friend a few days ago. The answer was, and indeed is not yet! “I should be home before St. Blaise’s Day,” I replied with a smile.

We drag our feet a bit on the way back. Take our time to soak up the sights Europe has to offer, and there is plenty to offer. We mostly followed the sun south without too much of a plan, which is probably why it’s taking us so long. We seem to be drawn like butterflies to a light, to lakes.

We now stay on the third, or maybe the fourth European lake, and this time it is in the Italian Alps, a glorious little lake that sits above Lake Garda and is filled with melting snow every year , it’s a real gem. If you can imagine a bright turquoise lake completely surrounded by snow-capped mountains and only three alpine chalets around it, then you have an idea of ​​what we’re looking at in the morning. It’s hard to move on from this gift of nature.

And our dog is going to be sad when we head south again, at least he checked “swimming in an alpine lake” off his to-do list.

Once we left my home island in the Channel, the travel situation became easier, if not the Covid situation. Things are changing so fast that it is almost impossible to keep up with them.

Yes, it’s clear that less people are moving around Europe, we’ve only been caught in one traffic jam in almost a month.

Have you ever had to show your passport to drink coffee? At first I thought Italy had the strictest measures, literally everyone wears a mask inside and out, but that was until I walked through Austria! Actually getting into Austria was easy, in fact while we were staying on the shores of a German lake (I told you we were lake lovers) we accidentally went shopping in Austria. “Are we in Germany or Austria? I asked my wife as we pushed our cart down the aisles. Austria was the answer. A day later we transited through the Austrian Alps.

Before telling this story, I know that Austrians had a hard time before Christmas and are probably more sensitive than most countries. So we stopped to refuel at one of those typical Austrian gas stations in the Tyrol region. “Could you show me your Covid passports,” said a rather stern lady as we tried to buy some coffee. Outside of Croatia and the UK, in our experience, you cannot enter a store, cafe, restaurant, hotel, etc., without showing the “Green App”. But Austrian took that to a whole new level.

“Yes, that’s fine, can I see your passports?” Helga continued. I didn’t just make up that name, I read its label. I was about to say that only people in official positions can ask to see my passport, and that I was just trying to sip a cappuccino and not cross an international border, but I stopped because Helga wouldn’t didn’t seem to have a sense of humor. “Ah, Thomas,” she looked at my photo, then my passport photo, then looked me up and down.

“She should work as a customs officer and not as a waitress,” I told my wife in Croatian so Helga wouldn’t put me in detention. “That’s all right, now one more step before I can give you your coffee, you need to fill out this form,” Helga said in an accent that made her sound like a character from ‘Allo, ‘Allo. Anti-vaxxers in Croatia would already have a nervous breakdown at this Austrian treatment.

By the time I filled out the form, my coffee was already cold and, to be honest, almost undrinkable anyway. It may be a stereotype, but nothing beats coffee in Italy, croissants in France and chocolate in Switzerland. We said goodbye to Helga, but we weren’t done with the Austrian restrictions, and it seemed that poor Helga had made a momentous mistake.

As we were leaving the store, another screaming voice in angry German stopped us. We turned around to find Helga 0.2 pointing to our masks and her mask. WTF! There’s a reason the Austrian looks like a flock of chickens. The only masks allowed are the so-called FFP2 and we wore surgical masks. Helga may have bombarded us with paperwork, but Helga 0.2 escorted us out of the cafe like a dog herding sheep.

Next, stop in Verona and a bit of culture, before returning home to Dubrovnik later in the week, it was an unforgettable Christmas and New Year’s break.

Read more English in Dubrovnik…well, if you really want to