If you missed anything and are interested:
A Trip To Switzerland, Prelude (travel tips for going to Europe)
A Trip To Switzerland, Part One
A Trip To Switzerland, Part Two
This is the final installment, wherein we visit Montreux and finally Geneva, before heading back to Dallas via Madrid.
SWITZERLAND: MONTREUX
So, Montreux is essentially our final stop here. We’ll have one night in Geneva, but we won’t arrive until the afternoon and we leave pretty early the next morning to come back home. My wife’s aunt (who lives in Bulgaria) will join us from here through the rest of the trip as well. Bulgaria is only a few hours away, much better than a flight to Dallas. She usually stays with us for a few months over Christmas, so we all know each other well.
I’ll go light on the train photos this time as it’s more of the same thing: A lot of water and mountains.
This is almost a three hour train ride, so there was a dining car. I decided to get some Special Hell beer. (It’s the Helles brewing style, which is light in color, full-bodied. It’s good. Most Greek beer is this way too.)
Arrival is close. That’s the outskirts of Montreux below us.
For our first stay here, it was time for a little more wandering around. We happened into the Montreux Jazz Cafe, not realizing what hotel it was connected to (the Fairmont, a very upscale hotel). It was slightly pricey for what you got, to be kind.
I didn’t get any pictures from there, but there wasn’t much to see. When we got back to our hotel, my wife had to take a work meeting for an hour or so. My son and I went to our hotel’s terrace (not shabby by any means, as we are on Lake Leman). We wanted some munchies, and we had been getting fries with ketchup and mayo to fill that void. It was served in a way my son hadn’t experienced.
My son doesn’t know that room service ketchup also typically comes like this, so he thought it was cool.
We were sitting on the inside of the terrace, but there was an outdoor patio too. I mentioned this place was on Lake Leman, and well, it is.
Once my wife was done, we were all hungry for an actual meal, so we searched for “restaurants near me” as one does when in an unfamiliar place and wound up at a good pizza place, similar to the one from Lucerne. My son also got a big dessert (which happened a bit too often on this trip, but it’s Switzerland after all). We also noticed something that we weren’t even aware of that was going in just a few days.
Juillet is French for July.
None of us were aware that the 59th Annual Montreux Jazz Festival was going to be happening from July 4th through July 19th. We’ll get there in a bit, but it’s still going, so if you look on the site, you’ll recognize some of the bigger names playing there. This is a rather large festival that takes over several kilometers of the coastline, starting about 500m from our hotel, and a lot of the stages are free. This is a temporary thing that gets built and taken down, and we were seeing it being built. Finally, note that we’ve switched from German to primarily French here. Yay! I can read some stuff!
You know who recorded an album here? Queen! The band! And there’s a lot of stuff here around that. Not only is there a statue of Freddie Mercury, a lot of the equipment they used over the years is on display in… a casino. To be fair, the small museum is separate from the casino floor and, also to be fair, I happen to like casinos. My wife is not a fan (of casinos), but we did make it to the museum.
Arguably the best rock singer and composer ever, Freddie Mercury
OMG, A DX-7! That Yamaha synth is on a gazillion recordings through the 80s and 90s by thousands of artists.
That’s the sort of tape recording machine used where Queen famously made the tape itself almost transparent by layering who knows how much on it for Bohemian Rhapsody (mainly vocals).
I have to be honest with these next pictures, because they are from a castle and, I can’t tell what castle. Someone reading this probably can. I promise there’s a castle tomorrow and I know which one it is. I think the one in the pictures is from Vevey. I swear I know where the castle tomorrow is, because they also make a very famous cheese there.
Mystery castle (for now)
After a bit more wandering around, we had a decision to make. We had come to a fork in the lake.
We chose wisely.
The next day, it was another train ride. Where were we going now? What more could there possi…
So what cheese could possibly come from here?
It’s a mystery, I tell you.
Yes, we are in Gruyeres, the place where Gruyere cheese originated. In fact, they have one of the official facilities that makes the stuff in this town. Remember that I said I had a better fondue than the first one coming up? Guess what cheese it is made up of? But first, we had to go see how this slightly salty and semi-hard cheese is made. (I don’t know if semi-hard is an official type. I know soft and hard cheeses, and this leans toward soft, but not that soft.)
That’s a cheese cellar, with large cheese wheels curing, typically from 6 to 12 months or longer. The longer it ages, the stronger it gets. They gave us little sample pack including 6, 9, and 12 month aged cheese. I prefer the stronger type. It’s hard to explain how large this is. It goes further back than you can see, and there are several rows of this. And it’s all robotic (hence, the somewhat cut off sticker mentioning robots).
Enormous stirring machines in varying states of processing.
The place where the wheels are made to look like wheels of cheese.
Hard to tell, but those are filling and the vat (the yellow-ish one) is emptying into that. There’s then an awful lot of pressure involved for around 20 hours, before they go to a very controlled salt bath. Most of it is, again, fairly automated.
After that, it was time for a lunch. I mentioned something about a fondue better than the one in Zurich and, well, this was it. It’s a 100% Gruyere cheese fondue while in Gruyeres. I would imagine it’s like corn in Nebraska or potatoes in Idaho. More realistically, it’s probably comparable to pizza in Italy. When you’re at the source of the food you like, it’s probably going to be really fresh and good.
Restaurant view
100% Gruyere fondue. Mmm mmm good.
We hated it.
After lunch, there was one more destination. There’s a castle in Gruyere, and we’re going. It’s not as big as the one I couldn’t name, but I got pictures from the inside, unlike the last one. There’s some neat stuff in there, and there was a little quiz game my kid could play for a free Chupa Chup (lollipop thing), so maybe he learned something.
Huh… looks more like a church, but…
A lot of the (roped off) furniture in here is from the 18th century (1700s), including this.
Looks bigger than it is, but it’s still a nice garden.
Things have changes a bit since then
I looked it’s not 88-key. But it’s length may be longer than today’s grand piano.
Gruyeres below
Well, that was a full day, so it’s time to go back to the hotel for some relaxation. There’s more to do tomorrow. Note that most of the beer in Switzerland, while brewed locally, is very heavily influenced by German brewing techniques, and that’s fine by me. Germany is immediately north after all, and they are fairly well known for their beers.
It’s Swiss, but it tastes German. This is a common beer in Switzerland, like Budweiser or Coors in America, only good.
It’s now July 4th in Switzerland, so the Jazz Festival will be starting this evening. Before that though, we can visit an old winery and see how it used to be done as well as how it’s still grown.
A super old wine press. Looks easy to operate! There were other examples of how that progressed over the centuries, but this was the most interesting one.
The next three shots are views of the still operating vineyards. For the winers out there.
We’re now walking along Lake Leman where the Jazz Festival will be. There’s probably a good kilometer or two of tents like this, each offering various local foods and some surprises. These pictures are about a third of what the crowd is at night.
It gets way, way busier at night.
Indian Street Food in Montreux. Why not?
A beer called Super Bock is a fairly major sponsor of this festival. It’s a Portuguese beer. In my head, a bock beer is a dark (or at least darker) beer. This is a lager, but it’s got a sponsored stage. This is a band (it turns out to be someone called Lusaint) doing sound checks an hour or so before they start.
This is one of the free stages, and these are bands that are not really known outside of wherever they are from. And it isn’t jazz. Lusaint is somewhat poppy. They sound fine and the musicians can certainly play their instruments very well, but as someone that was a music major and has written some stuff, there’s a difference between being able to play your instrument well and being able to compose something interesting. As I said to my wife, “A lot of people can play Bach but few could write like him.”
They were originally from Manchester but apparently moved to London recently. Anyway, they have a decent sound, but they lack a “hook” or otherwise something you may find yourself humming along to without realizing it.
Anyway, it was only my wife and I going out to these. It’s super busy at this point, and her aunt is in her seventies, while our son isn’t a teenager yet. They stayed in the hotel, which I think my kiddo preferred. He has crap to watch and play on his phone.
At this point, I was taking fewer pictures as we went. I think I was wearing out (it’s been two weeks) and we are going to Geneva on Sunday. I did get a nice Lake Leman picture though.
It’s our final night here, and my wife and I went back to the Jazz Festival to the same stage.
One of the many entrances off the street to the festival
More tents, getting a little busier. Again, we watched them setting this stuff up. It was quite impressive how quickly they did it.
Same Super Bock stage, different bad.
This is another pop rock band. I’ve written music that is more jazz-oriented than either band we’ve seen. The paid stages have the big names on them, but tickets started at $90 CHF per person and went quickly up from there. However, they are potentially far more the “jazz” part of a Jazz Festival.
This is an Irish band called Shenanigans. No word on if Cartman from South Park assisted in this. They were a bit better with crafting a song that could be potentially catchy, and it was a more fun show, until the end. For whatever reason, they ended with some slow ballad that dragged on far too long and we left halfway through. Or maybe a quarter of the way through. I don’t know. (If there was a song after that, we missed it.) So, a band that was better at the song writing part, but not in how to keep the audience interested. When I did live shows in college (mostly covers), I knew to end on the most upbeat song everyone would most likely know.
Before I leave this topic, I should say that Danny Glover’s famous line from Lethal Weapon applies here. Locally, if I have an extra ticket to a concert or if someone I know offers me an extra ticket, a selling point really is, “We have seats.” None of this SRO (standing room only) stuff. You know how at some point you, for the most part, stop listening to new bands but still get new releases from the band you loved (if they are still recording), and ultimately start relistening to the things you know and going to their concerts? It’s that, only sitting.
It’s off to Geneva in the AM. We only have one night there (and maybe half a day), so the Geneva section will be short.
SWITZERLAND: GENEVA
It’s only a little more than an hour or so to get to Geneva, and I’ve taken a ton of train pictures, so I’ll save the last pictures here for Geneva proper. (Notice that between every city, we took trains and, in every city, big and small, we took buses. THAT is public transportation.) Remember I said I had a much better swan picture coming up, I think in part one? Well, here it is.
That’s the famous fountain in the background. There’s a better shot later.
Swans are far large than you may think. I’m guessing roughly twice the size of your average duck.
The fountain in Lake Geneva
If you make super expensive watches, you are headquartered here or at least have a big presence here.
The UEFA Women’s Soccer Tournament is taking place in Switzerland this year. They were nice enough to make a big flower picture of a soccer player on the hill with the clock.
We ended up having lunch at the bottom of the Rolex building (one of them — there were multiple), some place called Casanova. The food was decent, but the service was noticeably great. It was weird. It wasn’t comparatively super expensive or weird food. They were just attentive and on point. I was honestly a bit nervous approaching it given the location and appearance, but the experience was top notch.
Tomorrow morning, we’re back to Dallas via Madrid. I have no pictures of Madrid as we walked fast/ran through the airport to get to passport control and then to the gate. It’s a bit of a trek through there. (My wife and I did this same thing in 2022 from Madrid to Dallas on an unrelated trip.)
There are no pictures of the airplane. It’s a big international airplane (Airbus 330 if your curious). It’s a long flight (10 1/2 hours), and I ended up watching every episode of Colin from Accounts, which is a pretty awesome show. It’s a very adult rom-com, with a lot of unpredictable but believable drama. I figured I’d catch up on it back home, but it is Paramount+. I’m not subscribing to another one of these things. I get why it’s on there (a lot of language and a little nudity), but I have enough services, thanks.
I hope you enjoyed my travelogue. It was a fun, exhilarating, somewhat exhausting vacation, but well worth it. I’ll leave you with a severe high temperature warning from Montreux that, being from Dallas, made me giggle a little.
