Ashley roared up the street around 11.15 in his recently purchased Ford StreetKa. He's pretty excited about this thing and he'd already taken a bunch of us for test drives with him, today was my turn. The ostensible rationale for doing this was, of course, climbing.

Ashley spent a few minutes programming our route into his TomTom (a GPS-based navigation toy) and we motored down the hill towards Bellevue to the sound of an anonymously pleasant lady's voice giving us slightly superfluous directons. Our first attempt at crossing the Limmat failed due to the World Inline Cup taking place around Bellevue and we encountered roadblocks all over the place. Bloody rollerbladers. After a bit of cursing we decided, as we couldn't cross to the other side of town and get on the freeway, to head down the Gold Coast and cross over at Rapperswil. Navigating through Seefeld to the sound of this woman trying to get us to turn around and go back was a bit straining. So I grabbed the TomTom and reprogrammed it - which is a generous way of saying I put in a new waypoint by jamming my finger on a low resolution map in the general direction Rapperswil. This strategy would punish us a little bit. But at least she stopped insisting we should turn around.

Honestly, I think it the TomTom was a bit pointless because I knew where we were going (Engi in canton Glarus) and my guidebook had helpful and easy to follow directions. But that TomTom had set Ashley back quite a bit of cash and by God he was going to get his moneys worth even if it killed us - which it would occasionally try to do. We arrived in Engi at just after 1pm. Upon parking the Ka we grabbed our gear and headed up the trail for a relatively short stroll to the Aaterästei block. This would turn out to be a very large rock which had broken off the mountain the best part of a decade earlier and rolled partway down into the valley. The villagers of Engi must have had a bad moment when they heard this one rumbling towards them. It's the size of an asteroid.

As we approached we could see Martijn and Lara on the left side, apparantly having a bite to eat and concluding that we had decided to bail. Not true, we had decided to arrive in our own sweet time, that's all. Ashley and I were both snapping away like a pair of crazed paparazzi so it took some time to properly get to the base of the rock. Lara and Martijn were pretty close to taking off, but they decided to hang around while we got a couple of climbs in. Ashley and I started up Al Capone (5a), but the beginning was so hard I thought we must have missed it and we moved across to eventually struggle up Andrea plus (5c). Quite dispirited at the difficulty of what we thought was a 5a we weren't terribly enthusiastic about continuing. But we took another stab at the first climb and found that after the initial moves Al Capone is a real doddle.

Clouds were sweeping in from the west, Lara and Martijn were leaving and we weren't completely happy about more climbing. We packed up and headed back down to the cars. Ashley's TomTom was a bit erratic on the way through Glarus and at some point that woman's constant direction advice hypnotized me to sleep (which is some trick in a small cabriolet hurling along at 140 Kph with the top down).