Visit Day 6: Chamonix

We waited with our trip to Chamonix for a perfect weather. We chose Thursday and we were not disappointed. Chamonix is a marvelous place where you can feel what high Alps mean. So as soon as we arrived on place we bought a day ticket for all lifts and we went to queue for Aiguille du Midi lift that took us on a great height of 3842 m.

I was on Aiguille du Midi in 2010 but this time a new attraction called "Step Into The Void" waited for me. It was a lot of fun for me but some people were seriously scared.

We spent lots of time up there especially that the sun that day warmed us nicely. So when we went down we needed to be hurry to catch up our second attraction "Mer de Glace". Fortunately after a 30 min ride on a very nice train we were able to see and even lick the longest glacier in France.

  

After so many attractions we went back home to eat something tasty.

Visit Day 5: Montreux, Gruyères, Broc

We left two most action - packed days to the end of our friends' visit. On Wednesday morning we took Ania and Wojtek to the airport (they flew to Poland) and we hit the road. First to Montreux where we saw beautiful Montreux riviera, castle of Chillon and of course statue of our favorite artist of all times Freddie Mercury. (You can see this statue on Made In Heaven album cover).

After Montreux we went to world famous village of Gruyères - home of Gruyères cheese and favorite place of artist Hans Rudolf Giger who is mostly recognized as a creator of Ksenomorfs for Aliens movies. In Gruyères you can visit museum of H.R Giger and drink something in bar that he designed.

After seeing Gruyères' castle, Giger Bar and Museum we became hungry so we went to Maison Du Gruyères for some cheesy food.

For dessert that day we served ourselves a lot of chocolate in Cailler Chocolate factory in a nearby town of Broc.

Visit Day 4: Lausanne

It's a nice coincidence that we got to see Lausanne - the city with presidency of Olympic Games - during winter Olympic Games in Sochi this year. We started the day by walking along the board of the lake in Ouchy district where also the museum of the Olympic Games is situated.

 

 

Afterwards, we drove to the city centre to have a look at Lausanne panorama from the cathedral hill and walk down the hilly old town full of fancy shops, narrow old streets and "ups and downs".

Visit Day 3: CMS and CERN

After a trip to Annecy Radek took our guests to visit CERN and CMS detector.
A story behind CMS can be read in this post (I won't rewrite it). Anyway, these are the last moments to go underground because at the end of the year cavern will be closed for tourists and prepared for a rerun of LHC in late 2015.

Visit Day 3: Annecy

We started visit day 3 with a trip to Annecy - a place I have seen thousands of time because it's so picturesque that every visitor needs to see it. For summer Annecy - check out this post. Winter Annecy is way different. Today it was a bit grim, with heavy clouds hanging above the lake. Fortunately, a general colourfullness of this place (houses, alleys, flowers etc.) made the whole town view more friendly.

We strolled around the village and then stopped at a restaurant to grab a bite and sip on coffee. We ordered traditional cheese omlette and cheese dish (with Reblochon - local cheese). Coffee was served in a pottery made in Savoy (this region). How quaint and lovely... On top of that, as we were sitting by the bank of river, enjoying local goodies, sky turned a bit brighter and we could see sun reflexes. We didn't stay too long though because later that day we had CERN visit scheduled.

Visit Day 2: Pointe de Chalune

During the second day of our friends' visit we wanted to show them what we have best here in Geneva region, so I took them to mountains. We went to La Chevrerie and we tried to reach Pointe de Chalune (2116 m). Mountains during winter are beautiful especially for people who have never seen so much snow before. Magda and Michał needed some time to get used to the snowshoes but after some time they started to enjoy the hike and views.

Unfortunately, during our hike the weather turned bad and we needed to turn back after half of our way to the top. But going down gave us even more fun than going up. We jumped with our snowshoes off the track until we completely disappeared in snow.

Because we didn't reach summit of Pointe de Chalune we decided to go and see a view point of Turet close to Gex, later that day.