A Day Trip to Lausanne

Okay, this is called speed blogging. I think this is most number of photos I've ever included in a post and I'll try to describe them all before Little Geek Girl comes home from afternoon class.

When we visited Swiss Miniatur in Lugano, we saw this model of the Lausanne Cathedral, and we knew we had to visit Lausanne to see it in person.


We would have also like to visit the Chauteau de Chillon in Montreaux, but with our upcoming move, I didn't think we could leave for more than a day trip. We took the advice of Jessica over at Swisstory and got a Tageskarte, which was less than the round trip train fare and also included local transport in Lausanne.

The train ride was a little over two hours and our first order of business was to find lunch. However, the first place on my recommendation list smelled like an ashtray, so Zürich Daddy Geek pulled out his handy iPhone and found us Les Brasseurs, which is a chain in the French part of Switzerland, but also has a non-smoking room. Little Geek Girl had her favorite chicken nuggets, Nai-Nai had a yummy steak frites, I had steak tartare, and ZDG had steak of another four hoofed animal.

Afterwards we started walking on the path recommended by the tourist information office, when we were side-tracked by a little park. After being very patient on the train ride and the restaurant lunch, we agreed that LGG deserved a little time to run around. ZDG and LGG played while Nai-Nai and I basked in the sun and admired the French Alps on the other side of Lake Geneva.



After our little break we were ready to search for the cathedral. It wasn't very hard to find, and very impressive in person.

Here are a collection of ZDG and Nai-Nai's photos.








Afterwards we walked down the hill from the cathedral. Here are ZDG and LGG running down besides the stairs.


At the bottom of the stairs, we ended up at the Place de la Palud. While I was inside a shop, the others were entertained at 4 pm with music and moving figures.


If it's 4 o'clock and we're out, that's a perfect reason to stop for some restorative cake and coffee. We found a nice cafe to stop and rest. Next it was time to go see the lake. We took the metro down to Ouchy and right after we exited we saw this amazing play structure.


While ZDG and LGG played, they met an American boy and played with him. ZDG also used the opportunity to ask the boy's dad for a dinner recommendation. And it was a good one.

Nai-Nai and I admired the view of the French Alps.


For dinner we took the metro back to the cathedral area and had an excellent dinner at the Bleu Lezard. We had an excellent meal in the non-smoking room. We didn't want to get home too late, so we weren't able to linger and enjoy multiple courses, but everything we ordered was wonderful.

And it meant that ZDG could get an opportunity to take one last photo of the cathedral at night.

An excellent day. French food. French Alps.

On the train home, the theme of the kids car was space. And there was an American family with four kids for LGG to play with. So she played all the way from Lausanne to Bern.