Virtually Home

On Saturday we woke up earlier than any of our bodies would have liked, and the extra-France residents had their first experience with a curtainless shower. Meredith was still feeling pretty exhausted and opted to stay home for the first part of the day, and save her energy for the Eiffel Tower that night. Mel and I took a few metro lines to the RER C and rode it all the way out to Versailles, which was a trip I hadn't taken before. Since we'd seen the Louvre just the day before, the whole trip felt like a big tour of Louis XIV's ego. The palace was, of course, beautiful and incredibly grandiose. It was also choked with people, and Mel and I were pretty constantly exclaiming over various photographic opportunities we might have had, were we given a shot that wasn't full of other tourists. There was a photographic exhibition on display, celebrating the palace and its significance over the years. They had photos from pretty much the inception of the camera, to the sig...

These photos are all from Lauterbrunnen and on, I think. The one at the left is just after arrival on Lauterbrunnen on the 26th...Not the best photo ever, what with the light having been terrible, but I think it sort of portrays our feelings about the travelling and many aspects of Switzerland that turned out to be frustrating. But I'm getting ahead of myself. We slept in on Christmas day. I think we might have awakened and walked down for free breakfast at the hostel, and then returned to bed for another few hours. I think the afternoon was mostly uneventful. We walked around Geneva looking for cool things to do. I was still nursing a pretty terrible head cold and the beginnings of a frightful cough, so Rachel suggested we look for something spicy to eat for dinner. Spicy of course, is relative in Europe, though Switzerland turned out to offer more in the way of flavor than the UK, for sure. We found an Indian restaurant that we decided to return to later. Somewhere during th...