In this installment of “Our Adventures,” we go to Geneva.
As it was the last weekend before school started again here in Switzerland (they only take 5 weeks of summer vacation, but spread the rest out over other parts of the year), we found that the train between Zürich and Geneva was a bit more crowded than usual. But we made it!
Saturday Morning, we took the tram out to CERN and took their two hour tour. It was really cool! We got to see the first particle accelerator that they ran from 1957 until 1990, the Synchrocyclotron. They have a very cool digital “demonstration” of the accelerator that they project onto the actual machine. They can’t run it because that would release a bunch of radiation into the room (don’t worry, we don’t glow now). We then got to see the control facility for the ATLAS detector, which was used to identify the Higgs Boson, and is a part of the Large Hadron Collider some 100m below the surface and 27km in diameter!
For lunch we headed to a brasserie for some amazingly delicious braised lamb and vegetables. The dishes certainly had some Moroccan flair and were absolutely perfect! While we enjoyed our lunch, some birds at the next table enjoyed a leftover cookie – they were pretty cute. Oh, yes. For appetizers, Christine decided that we should have some escargot. Apparently my reaction to them was priceless.
We spent the afternoon walking up the West side of Lake Léman. Geneva is really pretty and the lake front is no exception. We walked out to the quay just past on of the big beach parks. They have a “wake center” there, so we were able to watch some wake boarding, which was pretty cool. They have a tow line set up above the water with jumps and such between the two ends. It was kind of like a snowboard or skate park, but in the water. After watching a fair number of impressive wipe outs, we headed back to old town Geneva (up the hill), for a dinner of some really fantastic Italian style pizza. Super tasty!
Sunday we awoke and had no idea of what we would be doing. Being Sunday, many of the museums are closed, so we were left with a little bit of a thinking exercise. At breakfast, we ended up talking to a Welsh family, who suggested that we should rent a car and head south to check out Annecy, France. This sounded like a great adventure, so we went in search of a car rental, which also turned out to be an adventure in and of itself. So, remember how the museums were closed on Sunday? Yeah, so are most of the car rental agencies. Oops! We finally found an open one and the least expensive car they had was roughly a car payment, so we decided to find a new adventure.
Enter Genèveroule, a bike store that will let you have a bike for four hours and you just have to leave them a fully refundable deposit. How cool is that!? So, we took our two newly acquired rides out on the town. I quickly found out that mine was, in fact, the “old man” of the biking world – ornery and falling apart in some ways. The first sign was when I went to ring the bell and the top fell off and onto the street. Well, this was quickly remedied, and I kept a close eye on it in case it tried to escape again – it didn’t. The bell decided to leave the trickery to the bike’s drive train, which would randomly slip on hills. Good thing there were no hills… oh wait…
We biked about 3 miles up the east side of the lake before inadvertently following a jug handle that sent us back to the city. We opted for heading up the west side of the lake, and found it to be a much more enjoyable experience. There was less traffic and soon we were headed up a hill into the surrounding farmland and towards France. The fields that we passed on the way to the French border were beautiful and we got the sense of accomplishment of making it to another country – though as Mo informed us, yes, France is pretty close. When all was said and done, we had gone about 23 miles in our allotted time on the bikes. Not too shabby for city bikes 🙂
After we returned the bikes, we had a few hours before our train left and so we walked around, doing some window shopping (this is a big thing in Geneva). Geneva is the home of most of the big names in timepieces, so, as you might imagine, we saw some really nice watches. I resisted the urge to give one a new home, and we eventually found ourselves at a terrace café, enjoying some fondue. A wonderful was to end a great weekend!