First day of walking. Vaduz, LI to Sargans, CH.
OK! A real day! Hiking from Vaduz to Sargans. Not terribly exciting, but really a good warm up.
Breakfast was decent (I'll certainly get my fill of scrambled eggs, croissants, cold meats and cheese on this trip!) and we strolled on out of the hotel. We discussed "should we really follow the official track" and then instantly decided the track was more of a suggestion, a mere framework to guide our journey, not dictate it. More Protestant than Catholic, though I will say that church in Vaduz needs to STFU. No one in the 21st century needs The Church to be ringing The Church bells at 3am. We have cell phones for that.
(Speaking of which, where did that Church Bells Melody come from? Who wrote it? Couldn't it be updated to be, oh, the Nokia Ring Tone or something more modern?)
So yes, the apps on the cell phones (GaiaGPS and Swiss Mobility) both said "cross the Rhine on this pedestrian bridge". Sure! It was a cool covered wooden bridge from the late 19th century, rebuilt here and there. Being early Saturday morning there were a few walking commuters on it, but generally not really in use anymore.
Some slightly confusing paths through town--and up onto the hillside along the western side of the Rhine--and we're already realizing that the Via Alpina has those slight little detours over the past few years, the GPX tracks from via-alpina.org are maybe outdated and don't match the way finding signs, while the Swiss Mobility app is more accurate, but damn our T-Mobile service is not super fast but kinda OK.
Up and over the hills, a pleasant walk. A tunnel past some old mine. A group of Swiss bears. A fair amount of grapes dangling ready for harvest. A restauarant with a pleasant terrace, yes we must stop, have lunch, and have some nice NA beer. We're 2km from the hotel in Sargans, it's noonish, duh.
And then into town, a shower and a nice nap. Wash up. Feeling jetlaggy, maybe. Chris walked across the street to Coop for sandwiches and a nice 50cl bottle of light red wine. I zzz'd at 7pm, woke up at 11pm and dammit felt like it was time to start my day, so I made 42 PDFs of the Via Alpina stage descriptions and height profiles and saved them all in a single Note on my iPhone; that killed a couple of hours (tedious, yeah, but the website doesn't want you to copy text for some reason, so a reasonable workaround). Gave in around 1pm and ate a gummy for 5mg of melatonin Dreamworld. It knocked me out, slept until 7pm, with maybe 5 hours of bad crazy dreams. I should really just give in and let myself snooze naturally. More restful.