Which of course means Good Afternoon, in German.

And also in Swiss… because they speak German there.  I never realised that before, but I know it now, having just spent several days in Switzerland.

Wow! What a great place to go visit.

We stayed in the Hotel Monopol in Lucerne, which was quite lovely, but we also hired a car, so we could do a bit of sightseeing.

The day we chose to go sightseeing, it pissed down with rain. All bloody day. Right miserable, it was. But we had a car and we had waterproof jackets, so we took a circular drive from Lucerne to Interlaken to Thun to Bern and then back to Lucerne.

The scenery was stunning. Probably. We hardly saw anything through the mist and the rain.

But occasionally, the rain would pause and the stunning backdrop of the snow-topped mountains would appear.  Even a trip to the local pet food shop afforded fantastic views.  I daresay, the locals have got used to it by now, but as we don’t have any mountains in Luton, Mrs. M and I  were in constant awe of the vista.

Now, I know that Switzerland is famed for it’s watches, but as we walked along the main drag in Interlaken, I swear, every other shop was a watch shop.  How they manage to keep going, with so much competition, I don’t know… especially as nearly every shop we looked in was devoid of customers.

The following day, the weather was much, much better and so we decided to go up a mountain.

The train station was a minute’s walk from our hotel and so we caught a train which took us on a 15 minute ride to Alpnachstag.  There, we boarded the cog train (the oldest in the world) which took us on a thirty minute , very steep ride, 7000 feet up  to the top of the Pilatus mountain. The views from the top were tremendous.  After a couple of hours of looking around and taking in all the scenery, we had some lunch and headed back down  again… this time via cable car, which was a lot of fun… though Mrs. M found it a bit nerve wracking.   At the bottom, we found ourselves in the town of Krien.  A ten-minute walk to the main street allowed us to catch the bus back to Lucerne.

For our last day, we took a drive into Zurich and spent the day wandering around there before driving to the airport. We even managed to bag a Geocache, keeping up our record of having found at least one in every country we have visited.  Well, almost.

With so much to see and do, it’s a really lovely country to visit… if you can afford it.   Eighteen quid in the pub for a pint of lager and a pint of cider!

And a meal for two of us in a restaurant, was easily  a hundred quid or more.

I have never been anywhere so expensive!

Must be something to do with all that Nazi gold they have stashed away.