After a lovely week in Lucca, I drove back on Sunday. I like to drive in silence. The only distraction – own thoughts. Still in Italy, passing a service station, I noticed a sandwich bar called ‘Sarni’. It struck me as funny because in a particular English accent, the word sandwich is abbreviated to ‘sarnie’. The ‘a’ is elongated so much that a vague ‘r’ sound is needed to get back to the ‘n’. However, the same accent doesn’t pronounce the original word ‘sahrndwich’. Strange. In Dutch, a sandwich is sometimes called a bammetje, particularly for children (who later have to learn that it’s actually called a boterham). From there, my brain went to ‘bampot’, which is a Scottish name for someone who’s an idiot.
By now, I had crossed the border into Switzerland. Cursing myself for having missed the last chance to fill up in Italy, I stopped at the services in Como, where I paid 70 euros for half a tank of petrol (and no, I don’t drive a chieftain tank) and one euro to use the toilet! In dire need of comforting and having been on the road since 5 in the morning, I bought a croissant and a cappuccino. Then my phone refused to load the route again.
Din, din din din (use French pronunciation)… tune in tomorrow to find out what happened next. 😊