Went for a run this morning around the hill/mountain that St. Martin Bellevue sits on. The run lasted -- and this was not by my choosing, I should point out -- about three hours [time approximate because my beloved digital SHARK watch is spending a year holiday in Portland] up and down 20, 30% grades. A couple of miles in, I decided to take an unfamiliar side street. As it turns out, this was a poor choice. Things quickly began looking especially foreign to me.. hm, I don't recognize those brown cows.. I don't recall this bridge or that lake.. Oh jesus, a freeway?
At one point I found myself running along the highway to Geneva. It was here that the nagging "I may be a bit lost" feeling evolved into "I am most certainly lost. And headed to Switzerland." Drenched, confused and having just hauled myself up and down a mountain for over 2 hours, I was dreading the inevitable: that I would have to retrace my steps. and consider it marathon training.
Wishing for nothing more than to back at the house, eating Swiss chocolate and fine cheeses, I resorted to flagging down a motorist [of the kind-looking grandma variety] and using my less-than-adequate French skills to inquire about where, exactly, I was. It must have been a pitiful scene -- my haggard appearance, my odd & barely comprehensible attempts at the French language, the wild-eyed bulldog/basset hound that had started following me a 1/4 mile back.. So [I'm hoping this is what she was trying to communicate] this unnecessarily kind woman insisted that I get in her car and that she would return me to where I belonged. And she did. So I made a new friend today. sort of.
