Driving Onward

May 21:  Our trip is drawing to a close soon, but first we have one more destination to get to that was on everyone's list!

PARIS!

First thing this morning we took off from Lyon (after finding a cute little French bakery to buy some pain au chocolats for our breakfast) to drive to Paris--about a four hour drive.  It is Saturday, so we hoped to miss any heavy traffic along the way but alas, it was not meant to be.   Between a 40+ mile wrong turn we took and the horrendous traffic, it took much longer to get there than we hoped.  By the time we got to Versailles Palace  it was mid-afternoon and every open parking spot within a 47-mile radius of Versailles seemed to be already occupied.  It took us an hour to find parking.

So, it was clearly crowded....

But happily not nearly as crowded as the Vatican had been.

We also enjoyed the audio tour of Versailles much more than the obnoxiously boring and long audio tour of the Vatican.

We enjoyed exploring the palace and hearing some of the stories about the multiple King Louis that called Versailles home.

I also loved the natural light that was much more prevalent than in most other castles, museums,  and cathedrals we visited.  

And the artwork was every bit as ornate and beautiful as the Vatican had been.  

The worst part about it (other than the horrible parking)....

was finding out afterward that we were literally....

only a couple of blocks from the Paris temple and had no idea!   BUMMER!   We likely even drove right by it in our searching-for-parking escapades and didn't even recognize it for what it was, especially since it's one of only four temples that has no spires or Moroni.

After Versailles we went across the street and got some dinner.

It was a nice night for eating outside...

And we loved giving some real deal French food a try!

Stay tuned for our Parisian adventures!  

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1975, 1987, and 2016 versions

   Back when I was a young child, my family lived in Kassel, Germany.   While we lived there my parents took regular trips to the Swiss temple and while traveling there, would always pass through the cute little Swiss town of Brienz.   One time they got out and took a picture of me in front of this statue in the center of town.    

Our family visited Switzerland again (and several other countries)  in 1987 and my dad remembered the other photo and took this picture of me as a very awkward fourteen-year-old.  

Flash forward almost 30-years, and when my dad found out that we were traveling through the general vicinity of Brienz on our trip, he very excitedly gave me exact directions on how to find this statue again.      

So there you have it....a very cool reprisal of the same photo over a 41-year span!  

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Sick in Switzerland

May 20:  After a disappointing and tiring finish to our day yesterday in Lucerne, we were more than a little excited to wake up to this glorious alpine view just outside our cabin in Emmetten, Switzerland.

I woke up early and took a gazillion pictures of the lovely mountainside surroundings...

The kids were fascinated that we looked like we were higher than the clouds sometimes....

<sigh>   isn't it lovely? 

Ellie woke up feeling  ill, so it took a little longer than we would have preferred to get out the door, but I didn't mind the extra time to enjoy the view....

At my dad's suggestion, we drove through Brienz (look for another blogpost on Brienz coming soon)....

and then onto Interlaken.

Interlaken was much more the charming little Swiss town that we were hoping for when we went to Lucerne and we very much enjoyed taking in the lovely alpine surroundings.

Too bad that Ellie was reallllllllllllly dragging by this point and we didn't get to explore quite as much as we'd hoped.    She vomited at lunchtime and was now officially full-blown sick

 Luckily for Ellie, it was a day with a lot more driving than walking.   After Interlaken, we headed to the Swiss temple in Zollikofen.

Then we crossed the border and headed to the mission home in Lyon, where Cami will be serving her mission in a couple of months.

It was evening time, so no one was in the office, but it was great to see a glimpse of where she'd be serving!

We walked around Lyon for a bit and found the famous Notre Dame of Lyon high up on a hilltop overlooking the city.  

Lyon was a bigger town than we expected...

and we loved visiting the place that will someday be a place that is near and dear to her heart!

After exploring for a bit more, we headed to our hotel, where Ellie and I chilled (and eventually slept) while everyone else went out in search of dinner.  

Other than Ellie being sick, it was a great day!

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Favorite and Least Favorite

May 19: Munich was a bit of a surprise to us.   We only added it onto our itinerary because it was so much cheaper to rent a car there than in Switzerland or Italy, but we really ended up enjoying our short time there.

It's a beautiful city with interesting history, reasonable prices, and many lovely buildings.   And best of all, it seemed like such a cheerful place.   So many of the cities we visited seemed entirely peopled with unhappy citizens who were unfriendly and rarely smiled, while Munich seemed to be filled with the nicest people.  

It was pouring rain while we were there (surprise!), but we thoroughly enjoyed our walk through the center of town, including  a charming little market that sold a fun variety of food and souvenirs.

Unfortunately we didn't give ourselves as much time in Munich as I would have preferred, but it was time to move on to the rest of our journey!     First stop:   Neuschwanstein Castle!   

Actually, this first picture isn't of Neuschwanstein, but of nearby Hohenschwangau Castle, which was one of the childhood homes of King Ludwig and a big part of the inspiration for him to build Neuschwanstein where he did.   

He was a bit of a recluse and was drawn to the idyllic and beautiful setting of these lovely mountains of Bavaria.

He built Neuschwanstein high up on a hilltop to be a place for solitude and repose.  The hilltop location, however, made it difficult to build and he never saw it fully finished in his lifetime.   

The architecture is stunningly beautiful and it's so picturesque that it's actually used as a model for the Walt Disney castle.  

For as picturesque as the castle is though, it's actually quite challenging to get a good picture of it.   You can either see it from far away....

Or from right up close...

It's quite a trek to get up the hill to the castle from the parking areas, but our kids are troupers and have finally reached a point in their development that they do not complain about long walks anymore!  Hallelujah!

Thankfully we had a bunch of umbrellas that we had procured during our rainy day in Rome!

And there were some hot pretzels to give us a little energy for the long wet walk down!

It ended up being one of our favorite stops of the whole trip, which was good, because after our visit there, we were off to one of our least favorite stops of our whole trip.

Lucerne, Switzerland.  

I thought I'd done my due diligence and picked a great city to stop in, but, alas, it lacked personality, was grossly expensive, wasn't all that pretty (the city itself), and the people were among the unfriendliest we met on our whole trip.   The best part about Lucerne was the scenic drive in and out of the city.

That is why I don't have a single picture of Lucerne and would not recommend it to someone planning their own trip to Europe.

Stay tuned for more European adventures to come!

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Italy to Germany

May 18:  We woke up first thing this morning, checked out of our apartment,  and headed to the La Spezia train station.  After a tad bit of frustration figuring out all the details, we eventually purchased train tickets to Munich, Germany for the 6 of us.

We had to switch trains twice and  overall it was a long day (about 10 hours) ....

during which we slept, read....

and enjoyed the very  beautiful scenery.

Our neighbors on the train probably thought we were  a tad geeky, because we couldn't stop taking pictures out of the windows of the moving train!

We decided that we definitely need to come back to Austria someday!

We oohed and ahed over the scenery all the way to Munich, where we picked up a rental car and headed onto the next leg of our journey!  

But not before enjoying one of our favorite meals of the whole trip at a restaurant called Limani!

It was a pain to get to the restaurant in our beast of a rental car, but the mediterranean food was delicious (and not overly expensive) and the servers were friendly and welcoming.    We would definitely go back if we ever visit Munich again!

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