Roaming in Switzerland was not included in our data roaming package and was going to cost us a whopping £15 per 1MB of data! Obviously we turned our data roaming off immediately!!

Here’s a list of things that we wanted/needed our phones for but couldn’t because of the lack of data:
⁃ Directions, uploading our route map & google maps
⁃ Train times & train stops
⁃ Exchange rates
⁃ Google translate via camera app
⁃ Google pay
⁃ Wikipedia to know a little bit about what we were seeing
⁃ Sending pictures to our family
⁃ Posting the day’s adventures on social media (not that I do this daily anyway)

We were left scratching our heads and accessing that part of our memories when we did travel before smart phone even existed. Our campsite was in a suburb of Basel with a train station. We found the train station by following signs and then on arrival we had to figure out which train to get. There were 2 options, the fast and slow option. The fast option involved going in the opposite direction of Basel to another town and changing platforms – the slow option involved staying at our current location for 28minutes. We decided to go for the fast option, got on the correct train, but didn’t clock how many stops it was to the station where we changed platforms. So we got off at the first stop, which we thought was the correct one, only to realise that we should have stayed on for another stop. This meant that we had to wait for the slow train in the end. Although it was okay – I had downloaded my book onto my phone by this point – we sat on the platform, I read and Robin chilled out by playing games on his phone. We arrived in Basel at 19:40 instead of 19:20.

Basel itself felt like an international city – everyone speaking different languages and walking to events in the city. Without google we didn’t really know where we were going – we followed our noses to lead us to the river looking at restaurants along the way. We found the cathedral and the open air cinema’s plaza in its shadow, it was the film festival’s first night, and it was busy. We managed to find a place to have cheese fondue by sheer luck, which was good because we wanted to have cheese fondue while in Switzerland. We later (back in Germany) discovered that our dinner of cheese, bread, potato and beer had costs us as much as staying in a budget hotel!! Sometimes it’s nice to travel in ignorance!

For most of the trip, Robin has been making fun of all the cyclists that have been carrying physical road maps – especially if they don’t have a digital map backup. But when we were in Switzerland, I was looking at those people thinking – that’s probably a smart idea for times like these. We were left trying to interrupt different signs, sometimes easy & sometimes not. Our work around was tricking Robin’s phone to thinking we were in Germany the whole time, by self selecting a mobile service, but this didn’t work all the time.

Anyway, good practice for when we reach Serbia – we won’t have data there either. Maybe we should buy a map!