Globetrotting Europe 1

Today is my first day back in the office after 2 weeks of travel, and I am REALLY struggling to get my head back into the work space. My mind is racing with thoughts of the last 2 weeks, horrible news I received when I got back home (thinking of you my friend) and numerous other things - so I thought, before I forget to do it, let me get my thoughts down on 'paper'...

Dane and I have just been on a whirlwind trip through Europe, starting with a 10 day Topdeck tour (for those who don't know, Topdeck is a tour company like Contiki, but cheaper) called Southern Nomad. The tour took us through France, Switzerland and Italy with 42 other people, and it was definitely the trip of a lifetime.

The trip was coach and camping based - meaning we drove from city to city, country to country, and pitched our tents at the campsite as and when we got to each place, and then take them down again when it was time to move on. Not always the most pleasant thing to do, especially in the rain, but in the end it was a worthwhile experience.

I have a lot of stories about this trip, so this may be done in stages, but I'll see how it goes...

Paris was our first stop. We left London early on the Saturday morning, driving down to Dover and catching the ferry there. From Dover we made our way to Paris, which, Dane and I have visited before on a previous trip. Small world - turns out a girl we met on our previous trip to Paris was also on this trip with us :)

First things first was setting up camp - the tour guides showed us how to set up the cook tent (where most of our meals were made during the trip), and our own tents. Luckily for me, Dane has done quite a bit of camping, so things were easy peasy for us. After dinner and a few drinks (and an amazing dinner at that I might add - you wouldn't believe what you can cook up in a tent), we headed out on the coach for a night tour of Paris. We were shown all the usual sights, took some photos, walked up the many many steps to the Sacre Coeur, etc etc. We got back to camp pretty late, so it was off to bed before a big day of sightseeing.

The next day we set out early for a free day in Paris. There were a few optionals organised, like a Seine River cruise and a bike ride around all the main sites, but as Dane and I had already done Paris in a whirlwind, this time we want to take our time seeing the things we liked from last time. So, we started off with a walk through the Louvre - well, some of it - saw the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo, and a few other random things. From there we headed off to the Notre Dame cathedral and actually went inside this time. A service was going on at the time, so we had to take a few sneaky pics, but it was pretty cool being inside the Notre Dame during a service.

After that, we went with our previous Paris buddy, Casey, and another Australian girl, Jodie, and headed off for lunch in the Latin Quarter. After a great 3 course lunch for 10euros, we walked to a nearby park and lay on the grass in the sun for ages, having a nap, people watching etc. After this down time we rejoined the rest of the tour group who had been rushing around Paris on bicycles in the midday heat, and had an evening picnic under the Eiffel Tower. Dinner was followed by another optional excursion, which Dane and I did do - a Cabaret show. I'm so glad we did this - it was so much fun, and so entertaining, and we all had a really great time. After the show we sat around the cook tent having a few drinks (Maximator beer made an appearance) and getting to know each other before heading off to stop #2 - Switzerland.

Day 3 was our longest drive for the trip - around 10hours through France to Lauterbrunnen in Switzerland - and it was our bus drivers birthday. Poor chap - all he wanted was a beer.

The scenery driving through was amazing - the snow capped Swiss Alps, lakes... I've never seen anything like it! We got to a little town called Lauterbrunnen early evening and set up camp. Our campsite was a 10 minute walk from the main centre of town, in a valley with mountains and waterfalls all around us. We took a short walk into town and back before dinner, ate and then hit the campsite bar for drinks with the birthday bar.

The bar itself was really interesting - all over the ceiling were old luggage tags with messages written on them by previous campers (I managed to find a few Afrikaans ones), as well as bras left behind the bar by women. They also had a very strange drinking game called the nail game - this old tree trunk which you hit nails into with a wonky hammer. The last person to hit their nail in all the way loses and buys the whole group a round. Our group was skint, so that didn't happen but it was a lot of fun....

After a rather large night it was an early start again the next morning, with a train ride up the mountain to the top of Europe - the highest accessible peak in Europe, Jungrau mountain. There was lots of snow on the mountain, and the temperaturw fluctuated from -3degrees to -20 within seconds depending on the wind. It was freezing, so needless to say we didn't spend too much time outside. Inside there were some exhibitions and an Ice Palace, so we looked around then and then headed back to Lauterbrunnen - and the rain. It didn't really stop raining the rest of our time in Switzerland and some people had very wet tents that night.

We had a lovely swiss dinner, followed by a chocolate fondue for pudding. After that we were kicked out of the cook tent because it had to be locked up for the night, but not really wanting to go back to the bar, we made our way to the only other dry spot we could find in the campsite - the laundry room. About 20 of us spent a couple hours there having a few drinks and a few laughs, and then headed off to our not so dry tents to get some sleep.

The next day it was back into France for the 3rd leg of our trip, but for now I have to get some work done so I will leave that for the next instalment....