Mon 23 Nov 2015 – Apr 2016
After a quick stop off at the Lindt outlet store near Salzburg to pick up advent calendars and to stock up on chocolate for the winter, we arrived in the little town of Sent, Switzerland – just across the Austrian and Italian borders. This is our final destination and workaway experience before heading back to the UK. We will be spending the next four months helping to run a nine bedroom B&B, 1500m up in the Swiss Apls.
We arrived in time for some delicious soup, then unpacked the car for the last time in a while (what a relief!) and headed off to bed. We have our own beautiful bedroom. There are two other bedrooms, a bathroom and kitchen on the ground floor which we have all to ourselves except in really busy periods like over Christmas when we will have to share the area with guests. It certainly is giving us a great idea of what it’s like to live in a B&B.
The next morning, Dorothea showed us how to prepare and serve breakfast and how to change the rooms as we were going to be house sitting and running the B&B while they were on holiday for a week! Then she and Til showed us around the nearest town, Scuol and also showed us around Sent. They even took us out for pizza that night. It turns out that Doro and Til are the most generous people we’ve met on our travels and we feel so very lucky to have the opportunity to work with and learn from them. Dorothea has been thinking of odd jobs Matt might be able to do to earn some money and she has already signed him up for the ice hockey season!
The next morning (Wednesday) they brought the cat, Moritz, whom we were minding whilst they were away, and took off on their holiday. They left us with 8 guests checking in and out during the coming week. A new booking even came through when they were away for another couple. All in all we managed quite well considering one group of three ladies arrived with a fourth guest. They all wanted dinner (that they get from one of two restaurants in the town) and breakfast. Some had booked that, some hadn’t so the invoices all had to be amended. Another little hiccup was the last minute booking wanted a different room. The only one we could offer was in our little area which meant our bathroom was out of commission and so was the cat’s bedroom (we were OK with it, the cat not so much – he was quite annoyed!).
Also, on this day we decided to walk to Scuol to visit the Christmas market. It was a lovely walk down into the valley but took us around an hour. At this point the sun was setting and it was getting cold so we didn’t stay too long at the market. On our way back we had our first hitchhiking experience. We were going to pay the 9 euros total for the 13 minute bus ride back to Sent (the prices of anything and everything in Switzerland is astronomical!) but Matt had the idea to hitchhike as Dorothea had mentioned it was a safe and common thing to do in these parts. So we stuck out thumbs out (at the bus stop) to see if anyone would stop and it turned out that a very nice elderly couple stopped for us. They lived in Sent; knew the B&B and the owners and dropped us off right at our front door.
We survived our first week on our own but were very happy to see Doro and Til when they arrived on Wednesday afternoon. We now have a few weeks of quiet time before it gets really busy for the high season which starts on the 18th of December. When we set off on our adventure back in June we didn’t plan on spending the winter in a cold and snowy climate but we are both so happy that we decided to do it. We are most looking forward to the winter sports…from the free skating at the ice rink just down the road from us, to tobogganing and skiing…we should have an amazing winter.
As we will be here for sometime this may be our last post for awhile but we will upload photos of our winter sports adventures from time to time.
Happy Holidays from us and the Purple Moose 🙂
PS A note about the church bells…The church is a beautiful building that we can see from our bedroom and kitchen windows but the bells, oh the bells! The bells toll 24 hours a day. Two bells at 15 minutes past the hour, four bells at 30 minutes, six bells at 45 minutes and eight bells at the hour plus one bell for every hour. Then, while school is in session, the bells ring for 5 minutes stright at 7:50am, noon, 1:20pm and 7:30pm. And sometimes they ring for 5-10 minutes at random times during the day and we’re not sure why. We are getting used to them and they are rather charming!
Purple Moose Tales 