We left home in the evening and woke up in London. Not a bad way to start the day, unless of course you get stopped at customs for having a defaced passport. So I walked up to the customs officer and showed her my passport. She looked thru my passport and we went thru the normal questions... Why are you here? Where are you visiting? What will you be doing? How long are you here for? She then proceeded to flip thru my passport. She noticed that I had written several city names on various pages. This was my way of remember where I've been and what each of the stamps represented. She said, "while it is nice to remember where you've been, you know this is a government document and it's illegal to write in ... read more

Happy Birthday to me. I woke up to sunshine and clear blue skies. We had breakfast at our Bachman's stand along with Lake. Then we walked towards the Kapellbrucke. We decided to walk the wall of the City of Luzern today, so we headed towards that. Along the way, because it was hard not to, we window shopped. The shops are opened later today (Thursday), so we kept our eyes open to see what shops we'll head back to after our touring. After walking along the wall, we headed to the Bourbaki Panorama. The Bourbaki Panorama dates back to 1881 and is only one of the few remaining original circular paintings that have survived. It's displayed in 3-D panorama and depicts General Bourbaki rescuing the French in the harsh winter of 1871. About 87,000 soldiers were ... read more

Today we decided to go to Interlaken and keep the hiking low key. We took the train via Murren-Grutschalp-Lauterbrunnen-Interlaken Ost. We walked along "fancy hotel" row, saw a couple of tandem flyers land, had McDonalds and the took the boat cruise (1st class) on Lake Thun to Spiez. The 1st class only lasted for 1/2 the cruise though. We didn't realize that we were sitting in first class until the ticket holder agent came by to check and told us that we were in the 1st class section. O well, it was unintendedly nice while it lasted. On the boat cruise (which was very slow) we stopped by Neuhaus, Beatushohlen-Sundlauenen, Beatenbucht, Merligen, Faulensee and finally Speiz. We didn't stop anywhere except Spiez. We were told that if we were to stay on the boat and go ... read more

We woke up around 7:30 and decided to meet up at 8:00 for breakfast downstairs. There was a buffet and I had some eggs, bacon and bread with some really really good nutella spread! After breakfast, we decided to head out on a short hike for start. We took the Allmendhubelbahn funicular up to some view points of the Alps. It wasn't quite as high as Jungfrau, but just as spectacular. After reaching the top, we decided to hike back down to town. There was supposed to be an easy "North Face" trail that lead back down to Murren. We found it, then lost it, but ended up just following signs for Murren to reach back down to town. It took about 2.5 miles but had some cool views. We saw lots of cows grazing in ... read more

After a long day of traveling (roughly about 8 hours), we finally landed in Geneva. The temps when we landed were probably in the 50s but by the time the day ended, it was prob in the 60s. First thing first. We landed and we didn't really know what we were doing from a train perspective. There weren't as many information desks as we thought there would be at the Geneve Airport train station. We had a hard time finding our hotel. At least we had a hard time finding how to get to city centre from the airport. Turns out city center was only about a 7 min train ride from the airport and our hotel was just a stones throw away. We stayed at Hotel Cristal on 4 Rue Pradier. Very boutique hotel and ... read more