Oh yeah. Up until this point we've continued to devour a baguette each day. You see, the bread is just so soft on the inside and crunchy on the outside. The Swiss know how to make good ones too. Mozerella and tomato. Curry breaded chicken and apple pieces. Brie and salad. Awesome. But all good things come to an end. I don't know how it happened really. It all happened so quickly. One minute we were planning out breakfast and the next minute we're about to to fall asleep without our customary baguette for the day. But keine panic, we had plenty more!

From the moment we left Geneva train station to head to Bern, our obsession with Switzerland started and we knew we'd love Switzerland and everything about it; except the prices. They suck.

We cruised along the shoreline of Lake Geneva and went past town after town along the lake and all houses had glorious views. Lake in the foreground, the Swiss alps in the background. And these weren't even the tall ones! Even the grapes in a vineyard had a beautiful view. I wonder if you pay more for those bottles from that vineyard.



We pulled into Bern and stayed with a couple couchsurfers one out in the suburbs who was great and very hospitable she even cooked us a night dinner followed by a walk downtown. The next day we moved to another couchsurfer couple right smack bang downtown. We were super stoked to meet them and stay right in the middle of everything. The downtown of Bern is intimate and historic. There's plenty of old statues perched up on pedestals looking down at the passerbys. One particular one was an old man (ogre perhaps?) eating children. These days families use it however they want. "See that statue there? If you don't do your homework / eat your greens / make your bed, then he comes to eat you."






Part of the sensational views of Bern isn't the mountains this time, it's the river Aare that runs and wraps around the city. People cruise up the river about 1 hour by train and then jump on rafts, boats, tubes or SUPs and let the current of the river take you all the way back to the city of Bern, right back downtown. This is a really popular thing to do on the weekends and since it was Saturday when we went there, we did it! We had gotten the name of Neil (www.supswitzerland.com) from our hydrospeeding instructor back in Chamonix. We took the train past Bern Wankdorf and onto Thune area. Neil gave us some C4 inflatable SUPs and we were on the river.


Along the way we met some guys doing some river surfing with a bungee cord. They would get up on the surfboard facing upstream against the current and then they would carve back and forth using the elasticity of the bungee cord to carve. They were decent blokes and they let us try it out with our SUPs.

At the end of the trip Neil put a proposition to us. If we wanted, we could go to a class 2 or 3 river the next day and do some white water SUPing. Awesome. This was the first descent on the River Simme for SUPs and the three of us were raring to go. Balancing with constant rapids and changes in water speeds was difficult but we got the hang of it over time. The first section of the river was ok and we spent some time falling off. The next part contained grade 3 rapids with a rather low water level so we were on our knees a lot. The last section was calmer and we were able to stand up a lot and cruise along with the river. No serious injuries although Jen jammed her fingers, which were painful for the next month or two, Neil went head first over the front of his board and was lucky to only scrap the floor with his face, and me, well apart from a few scrapped knees and a bruise the size of my fist on my butt, I was all good.

From Bern we took the scenic route to Luzern via Interlaken. Beautiful. Gorgeous. Amazing.


It just kept getting better in Luzern...


In Luzern we stayed with another great Couchsurfing couple Pascal and Andrea with their little man Maximillian. They had an awesome apartment with absolutely beautiful views of Lake Luzern from their rooftop where we were lucky enough to spend an evening eating dinner up there with a few neighbors. Luzern was great, again the views are awesome, we rented bikes and road our way around what seemed like most of the lake. We were only there for a few days, but loved it! After Luzern it was on to Munich!


More photos from
Bern: http://picasaweb.google.com/jenscully809/BernSwitzerland#
Luzern: http://picasaweb.google.com/jenscully809/LuzernSwitzerland#
Interlaken: http://picasaweb.google.com/jenscully809/InterlakenSwitzerland#