A Vacation In Switzerland Around Lake Leman

It has been long since I had a vacation, so my wife and I, decided to travel abroad for a week. After some thinking, we decided to travel to Switzerland, hire a car, and drive around lake Leman (also known as lake Geneva).

With today’s technology, you don’t have to leave home to take care of the flight tickets or hire a car.

You can order the flight, print the tickets, and even hire a car and print the voucher with your home printer, and that’s what we did.

We flew to Geneva, Switzerland, and arrived in the afternoon. We received our hired car at the airport, and from there, drove out of Geneva, along the lake. Since it was becoming late, we found a small and nice hotel, right on the bank of the lake at Nyon.

There is always something soothing, pleasant and empowering when you are near a lake or the sea. This is one of the reasons we chose to drive around the lake.

The weather was excellent throughout our vacation, with no rain or wind.

We did not reserve any room before we traveled. There are so many hotels in Switzerland, so we just drove, and in the late afternoon looked for hotels. The hotels in Switzerland are quite expensive, but they are clean and pleasant, of high quality, and they usually include breakfast.

A Visit to Vevey

There were many highlights during this vacation, but I would like to mention two of them. The first is a town called Vevey. We arrived there at noon, stayed the night and left at noon the next day. This was our second visit to this beautiful town.

Vevey has a wonderful promenade along the bank of the lake, where you can stay for hours enjoying every minute, watching the water, the mountains, the boats, the swans and the people walking there.

Vevey is a wonderful place to stay for a while, relax, get inspired from the scenery, and fill yourself with positive energies.

In the morning, while walking along the promenade, we discovered that they had a show of old, classic cars. There were there many models of old cars, all looking in top condition. We took a lot of photos of cars, which you can see only in old movies, or movies about the 20th century. They have a website about these cars and checking I discovered they hold another show next year.

A Visit to Zermatt and the Mattterhorn

The second highlight I would like to talk about is Mattehorn, the highest mountain in Switzerland. I heard that often, the mountain is covered by clouds and cannot be seen. However, when we were there, the sky was clear, and we could see its summit in all its splendor.

To arrive to the Matterhorn, we had to drive a long way from the lake.

We arrived to Tasch, a small town not far from Zermatt, and parked the car in a very big parking lot near the train station.

From there, we travelled by train for about 15 minutes to Zermatt, a town situated at the bottom of the Matterhorn, at about 1600 meters above sea level.

When we arrived, we were told that it was too late to climb, and so had to return the next day. We drove back down to Randa, where we stayed in a nice and pleasant hotel, the Matterhorn Golf Hotel, run by a warm and a friendly Italian couple.

Next morning, after an interesting conversation about the Internet and websites with Maurizio, the owner of the hotel, we drove again to the train station at Tasch, and took the train to Zermatt.

After walking through the streets of Zermatt, which is full of shops, hotels and restaurants, we took the cable car to the highest station on the mountain. We had to change three cable carts on the way, going through a splendid view of the town below and the mountains around.

Since we traveled in September, there was no snow anywhere on our way, but when we climbed on the Matterhorn, at a certain point, the whole terrain changed. It was as if we were in a completely different world, the world of ice.

If you happen to travel to the Matterhorn, it would be a good idea to stay for some time at each station on the way, to let the body get used to the air.

If you don’t, you might find it difficult to breathe when you arrive at the top, due to lack of enough oxygen at a height of 4000 meters.

To cut the story short, from Zermatt we traveled back to the lake. This time we drove through the southern bank, which is in France, until we arrived back to Geneva.

It was a pleasant rejuvenating vacation, with splendid views.