We meet Shane in Zurich and stayed in a really great hostel. We headed down town for a wander and walked up the most expensive shopping street in Europe... didnt buy anything though didnt have enough dosh! Zurich was a little quiet and dare I say it we werent really up for shopping so we jumped in our wagon and headed down country... 
We decided to head to Lucerne, the scenery on the way was fantastic! We stopped at the information centre and got details for going up into one of the mountain ranges. We headed just out of the Lucerne to Pilatus and caught a cog wheel train to the summit. This is the steepest rail in teh world with a gradient of 48% in places. It took about 1/2 an hour to travel the 2300m to the summit. When we got there we chilled out on the deck chairs (yep deck chairs in the snow at the top!) and soaked up the scenery. It was absolutely beautiful and you felt like you were sitting on top of the world. We had an excellent lunch up there with a very entertaining waitress who spoke 7-8 languages. After taking quite a few photos (understatement of the year) we headed back down the mountain. Next stop Geneva!
We got to Geneva and checked into our hotel before heading out for a wander and getting some dinner. There is a giant fountain in Geneva that shoots water into the air up to 148m, it was 200l per second of water that gets pumped out! Incredible... The next morning we jumped in the car and headed around Lake Geneva to the Chateau de Chillon.
The Chateau is huge and it is a medieval castle right on the lake. It has had a checkered past and a number of inhabitants over the years. It was made famous by Lord Bryons writing and was a prison and torture for many years. We spent a couple of hours exploring the chateau and then headed off to Bex. There is a salt mine there and were were very keen to go through and see how that worked! Unforetunately the next tour wasnt until late afternoon and we didnt have the time to wait around that long... oh well maybe next time!
We hit the road again and went around the southern side of Lake Geneva. This was a crack up as we were cruising through a little town we came to the French border smack in the middle of the town (we crossed the border...twice - we were looking for parking) before deciding that we would carry on to the next town for lunch. We stopped in Evian des Bains which is where the bottled water comes from... and had lunch on the lake edge. This was very nice and chilled out!
After lunch it was back to Geneva (crossing the border into Switzerland again) straight to the UN headquarters. I was very keen to go through but they were closed - bugger! So we just had to make do with having a look from the outside and taking some photos - there is a really neat monument outside that is for the ban of landmines. It is an enormous chair with only three legs - very effective!
We were pretty buggered by the end of the day so went and got dinner and had a wander through some of the shops on our way back to our hotel. We managed to pick up a swiss army knife for Shane (had to be done) before we got back to our hotel.
Our last day in Switzerland and it rained.... and rained... and rained.... so we went shopping much to the boys dismay! We didnt find anything to buy but it killed some time before we headed to the airport to catch our flight home. Getting back to the airport to drop our rental car off was a little funny! Geneva airport is on the border and has a French side and a Swiss side... we had to drop our car off on the French side (saved £200 by dropping it off in France rather than Switzerland) anyway we went into the car rental place and realised we were on the Swiss side so went out of the airport, crossed the border, back into the airport and parked the car literally on the otherside of the building and we were in France! Hillarious!
Our trip home went without incident, one thing that we found quite amusing is that in the Swiss airport you can buy Swiss army knives (kind of obvious I guess) but you can take them on in your carry on luggage... yep you cant take a bottle of water on the plane that is over 100mls but you can take a really good quality sharp army knife! Go figure!
Well that is another place to add to the list - the highlight was definitely the trip to the top of Pilatus and I would recommend that to anyone that is going there!
No comments:
Post a Comment