thewills'wanderings

href=’http://blogs.bootsnall.com/adventure/files/2009/10/031.JPG’ title=’031.JPG’>As we drove intp Switzerland Tim and I both commented on how it looked just as we imagined it, just like books and tv have portrayed it. You could just imagine Heidi and Peter running along in the mountains. The beautiful Swiss houses with window boxes full of brightly coloured flowers and high jagged mountains everywhere you looked.

We drove to a beautiful little town called Martigny and found a free camping carpark in the middle of town. I wandered off to have a look around and was surprised that it was a French speaking town. It’s amazing in Switzerland how there are distinct French speaking and German speaking towns so close to each other. Wandering in the supermarket (I know, that’s all I ever seem to do) I was very glad I had filled up the fridge in Italy and France. Chicken and meat in general was so expensive. About $40NZ a kilo of chicken breast!

We headed straight for Zermat the next day where would base ourselves for 3 nights. This is serious tourist town at the foot of the Matterhorn, an impressive peak that was beckoning Tim to climb it, as you can imagine. In Zermat no vehicles are allowed except electric cars so you have to stay in a nearby town and catch the expensive train into Zermat.

We decided to spend a day doing a walk in the mountains where we would leave Tim at the turn-off to climb the Matterhorn. We had to catch 2 cable cars which were very impressive and then we had lunch high in the mountains and walked 2 and 1/2 hours to the point where Tim went off to climb. I walked down the rest of way with the girls and we caught another cable car down and then the train back to our camper. Tim stayed a night in a hut half way up and then climbed the mountain early the nexdt day. It was a challenging climb to do by yourself and wisely he turned around 100 metres short as he felt it too dangerous to do without anyone to belay him.

While he was off having his adventure we spent the day at a forest adventure park, similar to Tree Tops in Auckland. The girls had a great time. There was a really good 4-7 year olds section which Charlotte loved. She was amazing and didn’t stop all day. We left Zermat and headed north finding a great spot to camp out in the middle of nowhere overlooking a lake with a playground next to it which was a bonus. heading north towards Germany we popped back into France for the night and stayed near Strasburg.

By this stage we were on the home run and decided to find a campground near Frankfurt-Hahn airport where we would fly out the following evening. After a bit of a mission of a day we finally found a paid campground which we really needed for the night so we could use washing machines and clean the camper ready to return the next day. If only we knew what a stressful 2 days were ahead of us……

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 11th, 2009 at 10:52 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.