This week, my brother and brother-in-law joined up with my sister, nieces, Soph and I to hit the Swiss Alps and Provence. Also, as it’s early August, the Fete de Geneve is in full swing, so it was a good
time to showcase Geneva, as the city’s energy levels are a bit higher than usual.
The first day we kept it simple with a daytrip to Montreaux and some local vineyards. While the kids aren’t too big on vineyards, these are among the most beautiful in the world, in that they’re apparently the only terraced vineyards facing a lake, anywhere. They’re a UNESCO heritage site, and for those of you who might not be familiar with what that means, it’s basically a guide to tourist spots that are supposed to have culture and stuff older people like myself are interested in. The vineyards had a nice walking trail, and I’m surprised we hadn’t done it before now, as it’s only half an hour away. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to hit any of the wine caves before heading back, but as I’ve discussed previously, Swiss wines aren’t exactly world-class, so no big loss there.
Next, on to Gimmewald. Gimmewald is possibly my favorite place in Europe. It’s this little village – not even big enough to be a village, really – that sits on a giant 
cliff above the Lauterbrunnen valley. It’s steep, and it directly faces the Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau mountains, which are massive – so you essentially have this gigantic rock wall in front of you that stretches up almost through your entire line of vision. It’s impressive, and surprisingly not overly traveled, meaning it’s also peaceful and quiet. It also boasts what I call “cow hikes”, meaning that you tend to run into herds of cows on the actual trail. I love cow hikes. Anyway – we went there for two nights, did a couple hikes, and just enjoyed ourselves. Sam found an awesome cheese shop in the town over, and armed with local mountain cheeses, we were set to sit around and relax (assuming a nice hike is your idea of relaxation).
One quick thing about traveling with kids - the nieces are at that age where they’re able to travel and have fun while doing so. They’re also at that age where it’s possible to get them into trouble; for instance, Rachel, 13, is learning the power of “talking back”. So in return for all the meanness my sister inflicted on me growing up, I of course found the most opportune times to get her to say something that would bug my sister. Ahh, family bonding! Julia, on the other hand, will say just about anything if you agree to “heelie” her, so between ninja punching lessons, I also taught her to say “duh-uh”, when somebody says something stupid. Her mom loves that one…
On to Provence…I always thought of Provence as the land of paced living, sun-drenched landscapes, and herbs growing like wildflowers. I will admit I expected it to be…greener. That said, 
it was pretty cool, and had it’s charms. We started in Arles, a city known for something or other (Soph told me, but I wasn’t really listening), and used that as our base. It’s a medieval city with old walls and all that, and apparently was the place where Van Gogh painted a bunch of his more famous works (there are a couple of spots where they put his painting in front of the scene it was depicting, to show the similarities / differences). While here, we also saw a bullfight – although French bullfighting is different than Spanish bullfighting. They don’t actually kill the bull here, but rather, they have like 20 guys running around trying to touch it’s head. Yeah, weird – but it was in an old Roman arena, and it was cool to sit there and watch. Of course, we were all rooting for the bull – and he almost got one dude, which would have been great – but he didn’t have the closing speed I expected of him. For some reason, the bulls kept jumping over the fence, which was funny at first, and then got kind of boring. In the end it’s just a weird custom.
Les Baux is another town we stopped in. It’s basically this old castle on a hillside, with lots of touristy stuff to look at. The castle was kind of neat, and they 
advertised a “catapult shooting”, which should have been awesome, except for the fact they only shot it like three feet and didn’t destroy anything. What’s the point of shooting a catapult if you aren’t going to destroy anything? Ridiculous. Unfortunately, we had our only casualty of the trip here, as the mistral winds kicked up a rock that flew into Heather’s eye, and forced us to stop at a hospital. She was probably cool with this, however, as it meant we took the kids out to the lavender fields, while her and Sam got some alone time in France. It was during this period that Soph and I learned we will be terrible parents, as it was well past 2:00 and we hadn’t yet fed the nieces, whereupon we finally found a small little supermarket and bought them some…bologna. Yeah - I need to start praying for our offspring…
We also stopped by the Pont du Gard, which is an old Roman aqueduct that spans the Rhone river. It’s an extremely impressive feat of engi
neering, and it’s also a great place to stop and go for a swim! We spent a little over an hour here, and while Morgan and I didn’t don our speedos (much to the chagrin of French women everywhere), we did wade out into the water a little.
The last stop was a town called Avignon, which had a giant castle or something that we didn’t see the need to go into. As I’ve said before, it’s easy to get “castled-out” if you do it too much, and since we had seen a couple already, there wasn’t much of a need to pay 12 euros apiece to get in. The exchange rate is brutal right now!
Sadly, everyone had to leave on Saturday, as we all have work and stupid stuff like that to go back to. But as with all family trips, we got a couple of good lines that will be inside jokes pretty much forever, which is always important. We also started planning our next European family vacation, so there’s that to look forward to next year!
Next weekend: Man Weekend / Girl’s Night!
Alps and Provence
