Birthday Border Crossing

Luckily Stephanie and I aren't hung up on celebrating exact birth days, especially if the day falls on an uneventful Monday or Tuesday. Although my birthday last week was Thursday--not a bad day--a work event had unfortunately occupied Stephanie that evening. Not content to rest on my dual celebratory success of Schwimmbad/Döner Kebab, we planned an even bigger birthday excursion for the weekend.

Overdue for a good roadtrip after spending too many weekends homemaking since our original November Sunday daytrips to Bern and Schauffhausen and our brief mid-December German Heidelberg weekend, we selected a Saturday daytrip west across Switzerland for a taste of the unknown...past that mysterious purported invisible border between Swiss-German and Swiss-French culture, the infamous Röstigraben or "Hash Browns Ditch".

Allowing Hobbes a day of napping, we hopped the bus just before 9am Saturday morning to the main train station purposely early, lacking advance tickets and needing to confer with authorities regarding possibly purchasing a special Swiss transit Day Pass. Within two minutes of arrival, the automatic teller graciously spat out the desired discounted passes, no questions asked. Although the "bargain" seems initially dodgy, the 54 CHF (ea.) Day Pass or "Transit Bomb" (my new pet name) justified itself in spades and afforded us an uncharacteristically spontaneous day's journey. Over the next 10 hours we glided from a high-speed cross-country train to a local train and bus to up, up, UP on a funicular to eventually another local train to ANOTHER train to ANOTHER funicular down, down (shorter funicular) and TWO MORE bus trips before the final high-speed train home, stopping in four cities/villages. The weather cooperated better than a blackmailed boss with an unseasonably warm and sunny day, 59°F on Feb 23 (yes, we're still in the Northern hemisphere), 11°F higher than average.

We practiced German comprehension on the initial overland train journey, window-seated next to a talkative 2-year-old curly blonde Swiss boy who, amongst other cutely incomprehensible guttural vociferations for 80 minutes, excitedly exclaimed Hier ist die Post! ("Here's the post office!") while leaving town, Fährt es schnell! ("It's going fast!") as the train accelerated, and Grosser Rauch! ("Big smoke!") at an enormous cloud of nuclear power plant emmissions in the countryside. The journey's second half transpired more quietly, facilitating my unblinking focus on exactly where amongst the passing hills and trees the invisible border began. Once leaping upright as I almost certainly spied it, Steph assured me that ditch was for a new rural drainpipe and not the Röstigraben. Then suddenly, before you could pinpoint exactly when, the train announcements and station signs had transformed from from German to French! We'd arrived!

Our destination was the Vaud region's string of villages composing Switzerland's winemaking epicenter, bordering northern Lake Léman, or Lake Geneva, with French Alpine views beyond. Truly amazing vistas, but pictures (hey! finally pictures again!) can do the talking:

http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=2hd8fyj.77nscoxj&x=0&y=c76wy1

We started in the town of Vevey at a lakeside farmers' market, with an array of fantastic French-influenced breads, cheeses, meats and baked goods. I'm certainly not faulting Zürich's markets, but the French just have that extra je ne sais quoi. Hungry from the train ride, we shared a small, hot cheese tart--possibly among the best food items in our four months here--and a powdered-sugar covered éclair full of vanilla cream and with its inner walls somehow "painted" with dark chocolate--I missed the exact name (French, not German) but rank it as the new #1 undisputed heavyweight pastry of Switzerland.

We ate a lovely simple French lunch complete with rosé wine at an old-fashioned chalet-looking restaurant, then found a funicular way up to nearby Chardonne, one of many tiny wine-making villages strung along the steep Vaud hillsides. Not a soul stirred in the village that sunny Saturday afternoon with even the community weinhalle for local tastings closed. We hiked steeply down through the slumbering vineyards to another adorable, tiny deserted village, St. Saphorin, before deciding to catch the train(s) back towards home but with a final stop in one of the quintessential "borderline" towns, Fribourg (or if you're German, Freiburg). We navigated our way into Fribourg's snakey, lowland, "Bern-with-a-French-twist" old town area in time for a quick bistrot dinner, returning to the train station just after nightfall with an incomplete appreciation for the town. (The picture heading this blog is the Freibourg train station bookstore.)

Tired but happy after a long day, we shared a large can of local Fribourg brew Cardinal lager on the ride home to Swiss-Germany, determining to return soon to this "other side" of Switzerland.

Here are two maps from the day:


View Larger Map


View Larger Map