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Saturday September 24th 2005
Another early start. 9:15am, in an unsuspecting motor shop's carpark the 100 or so contestants gathered. First order of the day was for a group photoshoot and cathing up on who had dropped out after day 1.
For todays challenge we were given a booklet of 20 photo's taken somewhere between Saarnen and Tirano (our destination for the day). Mike started the days driving leaving Simon and I to memorise the photographs. With the exception of a couple of iffy looking pictures, mainly of random mountain tops, we were fairly confident of how we were going to fare for the day.
Our confidence had wained a little however by the time we swapped over at lunch with just 2 of our 20 photographs under our belts. Simon took on the next stage of the driving meaning I had to keep my eyes especially open from the back whilst we drove and mike flicked through the pictures. Progress after lunch was good and by the time I came to take over the driving we were well over half way though our pictures. The day's instructions said the angle of the picture was all important and our photographs needed to be as close to the original as possible. This meant, on several occasions we had to join other teams standing in the middle of main roads attempting to dodge the oncoming traffic whilst doing our best impression of David Bailey. Twice on the twisty mountain passes we past convenient stopping points for photographing and Simon drew the short straw to run back up the mountains to capture that all elusive snap. Much credit due here.
By the end of the day we'd managed to collect 16 of our 20 pictures and were feeling fairly pleased, although confident that the other 4 photographs we hadn't managed to capture were infact not on the official route. As we were running slightly behind schedule we opted to go over the Bernina pass into Italy as opposed to the much publicized Stelvio route. It later transpired that the Italian border control on the route we hadn't taken were very friendly and warmed to the S2N quest. The same, sadly, was not true for the border we passed through. Passports and various eMails shown later, after around 10 minutes of intense interrogation, Team 83 was allowed into Italy. We'd not managed to get a booking in the official hotel for this evening, so set off to try and find the small village where we had a B&B booked. Fortunately, I'd been forward thinking enough to print out an RAC European route plan to our destination. Unfortunately, the B&B was not where it said it was on the internet. We attempted in our best broken Itian to ask a passing local where the hotel in Stazzona was, only to receive the reply that there was no Hotel in the town. Time to try and get hold of the B&B by phone. While I was repeatedly greeted with "Number not available" the owner of the house we had pulled up by came out and was fortunately able to speak a little English. Thankfully, they knew exactly where the B&B was and literally just round the corner we found our accomodation for the night. As we pulled up, the wife of the owner - who also spoke no english at all, came out to greet us. Much smiling and hand gesturing later, we had been shown to our room (which incidentally was quite cool as it was actually built into the mountainside) and acquired our key. Our final task for the day was to head back into the Tirano and register our photographs.
A score of 16 it turned out was fairly respectable, so feeling quite pleased with ourselves, settled down for our first proper Italian food of the trip. Chatting to other competitors over dinner, it turned out that the driving directions we'd been given for the day's challenge were ambiguous, and we'd managed to take a short stretch of motorway where we were meant to take a local road instead. In doing so, we'd missed out on the 4 pictures we hadn't managed to get. Ah well.. will try harder next time!
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