Today the plan was to train to Lausanne, meet up with Dave from Geneva, have lunch and take the boat across Lake Geneva to Evian to drink some of their damned water. And so we did. The end. Wait. You don't get off that easy.
The Bern contingent didn't get off and running on time. We were awake but missed the 10 AM train and almost blew off the 10:30 one. We arrived one train late in Lausanne and Dave had patiently waited for the second train figuring we were lazy doofi (plural of doofus) and he was right. We walked down to the lake front, which is actually a different town from Lausanne, a small burg called Ouchy. We were obviously walking into some kind of event because the roads were barricaded and crowds were congregating at what appeared to be a Start/Finish line. And sure enough, we had come on the day of their Triathalon. So we found a nice outdoor cafe to eat our lunch and we watched those poor fit running bastards drag themselves to the tape while we noshed pasta, croissants and ravioli, swigging our beer. Delightful!
We found the boat to Evian, which was close by as it turned out, after having walked a few thousand miles in the wrong direction, and we crossed Lac Leman, enjoying the delightful breeze in the sun. The French Alps had a mist on them that kept us from seeing Mt. Blanc, but our walking tour of Evian was really very enjoyable. The view back across to Lausanne and down to Montreux was one from a postcard and we walked up to the high vantage point in the city to take advantage of it. We opted not to go to the bottling plant 4 kilometres out of town (surprise) and instead drank some of their damned water from the spigot coming out of the mountain. The lab results should be back next week to help us figure the correct treatment for whatever we got in that water.
The vague idea was to find a place to eat dinner either there or in Lausanne, but Bree our Food Guru came up with the idea to go back to Fribourg again for a "Last Supper" and show Dave what all the fuss I had made all these years was about. So we crossed back across the lake, found a bus to take us back up the hill to Lausanne Gare (for free!) where we went off to Fribourg for fondue at Cafe du Midi and a vista view of Fribourg for the last time in a while.
Perfectly timing our departure, we arrived on the platform within 5 minutes of both trains to Geneve and Berne leaving. We said our goodbyes to Dave and arrived back at the apartment just as the last light of the day was fading. Coming from the station, I swore I saw lightning over the Alps to the southeast, but no one else did. Brian wouldn't believe God would do that to me and actually possibly rain while in Switzerland! We were tired, of course, and, as Brian correctly noted, "We squeezed all the sunlight out of this day, too!" See slide show of Lausanne/Evian.
(Note: As I type this the morning after, we suffered through one Hellacious Thunderstorm last night! I DID see lightning over the Alps!!)
Videos:
See video of boat ride to Evian.
See video of boat ride back to Lausanne.
See SILENT (yeah!) video of Terry saying farewell to Fribourg.
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