Campervan Therapy

We camp up on the outskirts of La Lechère merely because Marie France has a vacancy. We’ve got to stop before we face the road up to the St. Bernard Pass whose sheer drops are destined to send my nerves into overdrive and to have Seán demanding that I stop with the hand signals every time the side of the road plunges into a death-defying canyon.   

As we wander along the new cycle path 500 metres to the town, by River Isere, by clear water wells, striking flower beds in scarlet and purple, and towering crags, we’re seduced. La Lechère is a spa town, the grand hotel redolent of glamour and consumptive heroines.

It makes us smile when we read that King Farouk stayed here as my dear old mum used to call my dad King Farouk when he’d come in starving from work asking for his dinner.

Set among graceful lawns and copious flower beds, the white spa building is reminiscent of a Moorish castle. The bustling food market offers us up the best Compte cheese I’ve tasted in years and a subtle herbed goat’s cheese along with super sweet cherries and grapes – a feast for the senses.

Just up the road, in St. Laurent there’s the Cascades, which involve a walk up a mountain, along the banks of the Morel River, which has been engineered into a series of steps, pools and cascades down the mountain side since the late 1800s.

This was to control the flooding which as the sign says, ‘menaced’ the village. Along with reforestation of the mountainside this has prevented the previous years’ mass destruction. One sign tells us of a man stuck up a tree for two days as the floods raged below.

If Seán is in engineering heaven studying the signs about the works, he’s even more delighted with scanning each tree label to see whether we’re right in guessing the names. I would say we’re 90% wrong identifying elm, ash, sweet cherry, sycamore, larch, maple, birch and hazel.

The D1090 jack-knives up the mountain to the pass, the blue-hued mountains ranging away to the distance. But I’m forced into my usual hand on Seán’s arm, other one on the door, in case I need to pull him out before we plunge into the depths below.

The pass itself is superlative in terms of awe and wonder: snow coated mountain crests, wetlands with crystal-clear streams, carpets of wildflowers. Simple flowers elsewhere are exaggerated in the Alps, so even the humble clover becomes a leggier more vibrant purple, a more elegant bloom.

Lake Verney is an emerald jewel on the border itself, with just the whistle of a Eurasian Widgeon on the air, but the concrete blocks, underground bunkers and tunnels speak of the horror felt by the Italian soldiers who spent months following orders to defend the border here in WWII.  

An imagined soldier’s voice talks of how war wears a man down until he’s nothing more than a sewer rat in flooded tunnels. Despite the cheery statues of Saint Bernard dogs, the Roman fort ruins and Roman road running straight over the border tells us just how much strife and suffering borders cost us all.