Ok, I left off when I was last in Feldkirch. After I left Austria, I took a day and went to Liechtenstein. It was really beautiful there. I took a bus from Vaduz up to a town called Malbun and went hiking for a few hours. It’s amazing up there, you can see Austria and Switzerland when you look out over the landscape.
After leaving Liechtenstein, I moved on to a small town in Switzerland called Gimmelwald. It’s in the Jungfrau region and is only accessible by foot or by cable car. The town itself has a hostel a few cows, chickens and a couple of houses. That’s it. The next town up the hill has a grocery and is really quite lovely. My second day there I went out hiking with some other people from the hostel. The view is absolutely amazing, you look out the bathroom window in the hostel and see Jungfrau across the valley. My second day there was Swiss National Day, kind of like our Independence Day. We had a big party with fried cheese, paper lanterns, a parade through town and fireworks.
Next stop was a small town in French Switzerland called Gryon. The landscape there wasn’t as lovely as it was in Gimmelwald, but I never wanted to leave the hostel. Made some good friends and ended up staying much longer than I’d intended. Eventually, I did have to go and move on to Lyon in order to pick up a few important things in the post (lost wallet replacement stuff).
Lyon was beautiful, but I ended up being fairly cranky the entire time because of some problems with banks, post offices and rude people. After an extra day or two there I finally managed to escape and head off to Toulouse replacement debit card in hand.
Toulouse is gorgeous. It’s referred to as “pink city” because the entire place has a pink glow to it. Everything is this lovely terracotta color, although half of the shops were closed for summer vacation.
After Toulouse, I took a train across the country to the north and landed in Rennes in Brittany. The city was amazing, the architechture there is completely different from that in the south. It’s more like what you’d find in mid-Germany, half timbered houses and little winding streets. The next day I stayed in Rennes, but headed up to teh coast to St Malo for the day. Of course, it rained almost the entire day but I did get my feet in the water for a minute or two while it was clear. There are old ramparts to the city that look out over the water towards the UK.
There’s still more to update, but time is short. I’ll leave more for another email.
Vanessa