Thursday, October 11, 2007

En Suisse! Days 1 & 2 (10/10-11)

Hello all! We made it to Switzerland yesterday (10/10) after a bumpy, but otherwise decent flight. We only got to drive by the UN, since it is pretty off-limits for just stopping to take pictures, as you can imagine, but the flags were neat to see.
We toured a bit around Geneva on foot and it seemed quite nice. Very metropolitan. They have a 450 ft tall water spout that just blasts a spout of water out of the lake super high. It was huge.
After the hour drive on our tour bus to Montreux, we arrived at our "home" for the duration...Le Montreux Palace. It is a wonderful and beautiful hotel, both inside and outside. Charlie and I got an upgraded room because we're on our "honeymoon" (we'll tell about the 'newlyweds' comment later). It's really a nice room. Marble/granite floors and countertops in the bathroom, a high-tech closet and a two-flush toilet. Charlie is mostly excited about the "big flush" option. Maybe we'll have one in our home soon?
We took a small nap for about an hour, hour half, then met the group downstairs for dinner across from the Chateau Chillon, which we would visit today. I think the restaurant was called Le Taverne du Chateau Chillon. Good beef dinner and a glass of wine. Then it was off to bed. We were so pooped.
Today we got up after sleeping 10 hours (at least) and met the group downstairs for our daily breakfast. Fantastic meats, cheeses, juices and even some eggs. I was jones-ing for some soft-boiled eggs in those fun little egg cups, so I grabbed one. Unfortunately for me we got to breakfast a smidge late, so my soft-boiled egg was fully-boiled. Oh well, maybe tomorrow. Also, our guide told us we should try this mueslix-yogurt mix that looked like tuna, so we did. It was quite good, really sweet and had a tang to it. I asked Charlie if he thought it was laced with something fun.,.he declined to comment.
Once breakfast was done, we headed to the Chateau Chillon, about 10 minutes down the road from our hotel. We had a wonderful guided tour of the place and of course I took a million pictures. It was a nice tour and was Charlie's first castle tour, so I think he enjoyed it even more than I did!
After a quick break for lunch in Montreux (we had a chicken sandwich from the Migros, a local grocery store), we headed to Aigle to get a tour of another castle and wine museum. That was very cool. We had no idea that Switzerland was known for its wine too, but it is! There are vineyards all over the place here, and the wine is very good. Today was Swiss Wine Country time. The castle guided tour was also very fun to listen to, but I think we were all ready to hop on the tour bus and get to our wine tasting by the end of it. Our driver, Jose (yep, ho-zay) got us a little lost on the way, but it was fun. The local vineyard/winery we went to, Vogel Winery, was very generous with their tasting sizes, I think we had a total of 1.5 glasses of wine, trying 4 wines and enjoying them all. Que delicioso! As the sun set over lake Geneva and the vineyards, it was great sipping on the local wine and snuggling my husband.
A quick drive to another small lake was a good dinner of Schnitzel and french fries, some more wine and passionfruit-marscapone cream dessert...now it's time for bed as we have an early day tomorrow. Ciao!

1 comment:

Mrs. T said...

Sounds lovely! I can't wait to see the pictures!!! :) Love you guys!