Three Countries in One Day

On Thursday hubby drove us from the embarassingly multi-lingual Luxembourg and in to the Black Forest region of Germany. We spent two nights at a very lovely, but very 70s hotel overlooking the city of Freiburg. We were very excited about this hotel as it had lots of terraces upon which we could lounge and catch some rays as well as a swimming pool. The weather so far on our trip has been very hot (apart from the day when it started a little overcast but then ended up roasting as soon as we got to Amsterdam) so we planned to spend most of Friday making use of the pool and sun loungers. And guess what? It rained.

So instead we made the short drive to Titisee (great name) to admire the lake and profusion of tat shops offering all manner of cuckoo clocks, stuffed toys and other souvenirs you really don’t need. We bought a Christmas tree decoration in the shape of a cuckoo clock – how could we resist?!

This morning dawned bright and sunny, of course, as we set out to drive to Liechtenstein (tick!) Took a few hours to get there due to my map reading which detoured us through the centre of Zurich and along the side of the lake when we should have been on the motorway, but at least it was scenic. We found ourselves in Vaduz, the tiny capital of tiny Liechtenstein just in time for lunch which was very fortuitous. After lunch we enjoyed a 10 minute stroll around the ‘city’ and by then we’d seen just about everything Vaduz had to offer.

It is in a very pretty setting, overlooked by a craggy mountain on top of which sits the royal castle – all very fairytale – but not much to detain us especially when we enquired about hotel rooms and were somewhat stunned by the prices . And so we drove on to our third country of the day – Switzerland. And now we are spending an exciting Saturday night in an Ibis hotel situated above a McDonalds (handy for dinner…) in the town of Chur. Tomorrow we plan to head to Interlaken where hubby once went on a school trip and which he remembers as being very nice. Let’s hope his memory serves him correctly or there could be trouble ahead.