Last Swiss Post

A few more pictures from the trip.

Thursday night we had dinner with LL's business associates at Les Armures, a pretty nice restaurant near the Maison Tavel, the oldest home in Geneva which has a museum of sorts inside now.

Here's the menu, not a very exciting, picture, but something I wanted to capture.

And here's what I ordered, chicken stuffed with prune and duck liver. Those two sides are different kinds of polenta. Tasty meal.

One of the sites we saw on Friday was Central Perk, named after the coffee shop on Friends! The inside didn't really resemble the shop too much, but they did have sofas.

Look at this crazy crossing sign. They are very common in Geneva. Which one is for the pedestrian? It's that little one across the street which you can see is green when I took this picture.

Here's one of the towers of the main cathedral in Geneva, St. Pierre. We climbed up the narrow, circular staircase up the north tower and then walked down the south tower. Here's the south tower from the north tower I believe.

This picture from the tower shows how high up we were!

A shot of the city and fountain from the tower.

After getting some help from our concierge, Lionel, a very helpful guy, we took a free 25 minute bus ride across the city and country side to the French border and within a 10 minute walk of Mount Saleve. We got off the bus and walked to the border crossing. Unfortunately, as soon as we got off the bus, I realized I had forgotten my passport!! Doh! I was prepared to ride the bus back and forth, but decided to see if the border was actually guarded. Success, it wasn't. Getting back of course could be a problem.

Looking up at the end of the cable car ride on the top of Saleve. Yes, it was a bit cloudy on Saturday. Excellently clear weather up until Saturday though.

A picture from the cable car looking back down on Geneva. It's 3,600 feet up the mountain.

LL on top of the mountain with Geneva in the background. You can see some of the Alps in the background too.

ESDNM would have been jacked to hike this trail! It's on top of the mountain and is supposed to be a 30 minute walk. We walked about 15 minutes on it though and it was still going down hill. We're not dumb. We know we were going to have to walk back UP at some point and there is really something to that altitude training. Yowza.

Just a picture of the grounds at the top of Saleve leading out to the trail.

We rewarded ourselves with a nice late lunch at the top. Here's what LL had. She ordered off a price fixe menu.

I ordered my own combination, with an entree of mushroom stuff mini-raviolis. Delicious and filling.

This was the view out the window while we ate. Not bad.

We headed back down towards the border and found a shortcut to get there more quickly, thus eliminating most of the time for anxiety to build up while walking towards the border. Fortunately there were no guards again and we strolled through. LL was joking most of the time about how of all people, I was going to be stuck in France.

After hiking around the rest of the afternoon and nearly getting trapped in France, we built up a hunger later in the evening. Going back to the area of St. Pierre and Maison Tavel, we found this place. It was the first reasonably priced meal we had the entire trip! Remember, a coffee, tea and two muffins at the Starbucks was $18. No kidding and no exchange rate issues. Unbelievable.

This is what they served up. Sort of a small menu but they do it well. A half chicken, pommes frites and a salad for something like $14. Not a bad deal at all. The place was packed and people were waiting out the door to get in. We just barely beat the crowd and were seated immediately. They even had locally grown wine AND tap water!!

On the way back to the hotel, we were rewarded with this stunning night view of another fountain, this one in Place Neuve.

Overall a very nice, but short trip. Swiss Air constantly fed us on the flight and were very nice. The plane seating was 2-3-2, so there was only one strip of middle seats. You had your own screen so you could watch one of several new movies, tv shows, or play games. Much better than our airlines.