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Monday, September 28, 2009

Switzerland Trip

I do not intend to trivualize the portion of our trip spent in England because it was wonderful and we always enjoy our time with everybody there and just tripping around England. In this blog I will give you a little peek at Switzerland and Iceland.

In the first leg of our trip we flew by Iceland Air to Iceland. I was pissed off with Iceland Air because we had asked for seats near the wing and were told that we had row 16 on all flights then we were stuck in the last row and couldn't change. Then the flight attendants were not very pleasant and to top it off they gave us a couple of 2 oz. drinks of water during the whole flight. There was a questionaire screen on the TVs on the seats asking 13 questions of our opinion of their service, rating them 1 for good to 5 for bad, so I mostly gave 5.
We arrived at Iceland and had a 1.5 hour layover which we intended to use to get some food but we spent the whole time in security lines then onto the next flight which was much better but we were 3 seats from the rear SO I was still bad mouthing Iceland Air for the rest of the trip to England, Switzerland and back in England.

We had arranged for a Ford Focus before we left Canada But at the car rental I spent some time joking with the rental guy and he decided to upgrade us to a Mercedes at no extra charge which was kind of nice













We spent 3 or 4 days in Wales at Joan and Herrick's house.



This is J & H house from the street, that's our Mercedes beside the house.









Then I took our car to Birmingham Airport and we checked in on Swiss Air, flew to Zurich, took 4 trains to Wengen( pronounced Vengen) and walked a short distance to our hotel. About 1 hour later our luggage, which we hadn't seen since we checked in at the airport, arrived in our room.





This is Hotel Belvedere, Joan & Herrick's room is at the left corner of the balcony immediately above the arched window above Thelma's head, ours is along the balcony to the left from the corner.


This is from our balcony
Every day we took trains and gondola trips to various locations in the mountains. It is the first time I have ever seen trains that go up the side of mountains by driving them with "rack and pinion system" which are sprockets on the train.


Each day we went to a different area and walked the trails which were various degrees of difficulty this one was the roughest but spectacular.



The homes everywhere are well cared for and fun to see because of the pride that people have in planting flowers and even their vegetable gardens.










This is an example of what is a common sight.





This is Tea Time at the Hotel.









We went up a Gondola which went part way up the mountain then made a left turn to aprox. 80 degrees and continued to the top. At the top there was a zip line which travelled at about 85 KPH for aprox. 1 Km.










It was fun but also kind of boring, not worth the price, but glad I did it.
When we left to go back to England, we left our luggage at the desk and picked it up at Birmingham Airport, which I thought was a miracle.

We had a great time in England visiting with everybody for a couple of weeks and brought Jean home with us as a souvenir.









We left a Canadian thing in England

We left England and flew to Iceland on Icelandair and I changed my mind about Icelandair because we had much better flight attendants on this flight than the one from Canada to Iceland. They were pleasant as were the ones from Iceland heading home, however, we didn't fly to Canada, they sent us to Boston then to Pearson on Air Canada and unfortunately Jean will have to go back to England via Boston. You can now disregard my comments about Icelandair at the beginning, though we only sat in the row we had been told we would be in on 1 of the 4 flights.

Iceland was a big surprise, it was not like we imagined it would be. There were a lot of very modern buildings, lots of cars, and a lot of industry. They have a lot of trees which have been imported from Canada, Birch & Pine mostly. They seem to speak very highly of Canada and our tour guide mentioned different things in relation to Canada.











This is downtown Reykjavik.









This is our Hotel were breakfast was included




We took the Golden Circle Tour which was aprox. 300km and was a good show but to tour around the perimeter of the island takes 4 days according to a lady from Minnesota we were talking to. The island is about the same size as England with a population of 300000.






This falls appears to be about the same height as Niagara Falls. The water is from a glacier.















The 2 horizontal lines above the van are where the continents North America and Europe meet and are crashing together



This is one of several Geysers in the area that we saw on the tour.







This the end of the tour, there is much more to see but that's all you get from me.

6 comments:

Fiddling Granny said...

Great pix, great overview ... looking forward to the rest of them.

Good job on the post, I remember when posting just text was a huge issue for you!

SusanE said...

I love the trains using rack and pinion.

The Alsp look amazing.

Cherylinn said...

The rest of the pics are AWESOME.....so are the ones he's shared with us on blog.....
I like the line "you brought Jean home as a souvenir".

Stephanie, Matt, Kaden and Ireland said...

Wow looks like an amazing trip Granny... love the pic of you on the zip line you look like a young lad :) heehee

i too think the train system sounds neat,

the scenery WOW looks amazing maybe one day i will get to see that stuff, ah only 21 more years until matt retires so i guess i should start saving :) heehee

Laurence Hunt said...

OK. Sign us up. Great photos, and several of my favourite countries in one post.

Be sure to bring back some Swiss Francs, though the Canadian dollar is also pretty good!

I was a bit worried for a moment that you'd get crushed between Europe and North America, but you seem to have made it!

Prince Charming said...

Looks like you guys had a great time. and you definitly deserve every minute of it. Those pictures are absolutly beautiful