Summer's last hurrah


This weekend was officially our last summer weekend as the weather is getting noticeably colder and Gabi starts school this week. So we went to Montreux – a beautiful town on the opposite side of the Lake where supposedly the biggest jazz festival happens every year and, as we later learned, was also home to Freddy Mercury for years.
We arrived Thursday evening just in time for dinner and to get a glimpse of how beautiful the town is. However, Friday morning was chilly and rainy and I had to work so we just did a little bit of shopping around in the nearby clothing & toy stores. The kids were pleased with that of course, and Sebas, as usual, left the toy store with only Toy Story related items. He also left the clothing store with either Toy Story or Cars related clothing. That one has a one-track mind!

On Friday afternoon when the weather cleared up and I was ok to stop working, we went to Chateau Chillon, a beautiful castle that served as the main fortress for the surrounding areas since 1100 or some ridiculous ancient date like that. Gabi was a little weary of this visit (she hates walking and we had to walk quite a bit plus I think she’s got some idea that there will be monsters or something, she watches too much Scooby Doo!) but once there they both loved it.

Saturday was another pretty bad day, again super chilly and rainy, but we ventured to Gruyeres for a little while. Our initial intent was to only drive through the town, but then of course we discovered you can’t drive so we got out of the cars, bought ponchos for all 4 and explored a bit. There is also a beautiful castle there although we decided it was enough with Chateau Chillon so we didn’t tour that castle. But then driving around some more we found a fromagerie and we did a little tour of the fromagerie and then we found this cool “bob-luge” (it’s a mix between bobsled and luge) that we did. Sebas was the first brave one to go with Jose and then Gabi went with me and then I think we had to do it another 1,000 times before finally heading back to the hotel for a beautiful sunset.

Sunday morning we did a chocolate factory tour – and again Sebas won MVP for wanting to try all the chocolates! After that we had to go back to the “bob-luge” for another 1,000 rides, and then finally we were too cold and we headed back home.

I would say it was a pretty good way to close the summer and these are definitely places we need to take our visitors to! However, I’m not happy at all about the cold coming so soon, I really hope it’s temporary. Today supposedly the high will be 60F and the low 44F. Brrrrrr.

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