Lausanne, Suisse

Heading out to the train station

A little playground break while we
waited for our train, with Ella
"babysitting" Joey.

This must be what I looked like...seriously, it was steep.

After Friday's ill-fated tromp through Lausanne, we wanted to give the city one more try before heading home, figuring we may not pass this way again.  I'm afraid I've never planned more poorly for a trip: we're moving a little too fast, it seems, with these back-to-back weekend vacations, and I never did find time to glance at a guidebook and see what Lausanne had to offer.  I'd assumed I could do some research at the hotel.  But the hotel wasn't actually wi-fi friendly, so we were left looking at the map from the hotel and picking a few places that looked like they might, hopefully, be interesting.

So we stashed our bags in the train station lockers and set out for a few hours before heading back to Zürich.

We started by walking through the old town, basically retracing the route that the kids and I took on Friday night. Ella was pretty excited about revisiting our walk: there was a fairy-themed store that she'd noticed on Friday, and she'd been talking about it all weekend, and the wonders that she was planning on purchasing with the nine francs that she's managed to earn through chores.

You can always count on the Kebab stands to be open,
whatever the day of the week. This was calling to Dennis,
 but we were a little too early for lunch.

Do you have any half-dollars sitting around? Because,
apparently, 45 francs is the going rate for them here.

The Swiss breakfast of champions

Unfortunately, the store, like most everything in downtown Lausanne, was closed for the religious holiday that had given the kids the day off school.  We promised Ella that she could buy pretty stones and fairy statues just about anywhere in the world, however.  And we  amused ourselves with some other window-shopping, too.

A video store: this was their entire selection, from what
we could tell.

A quick glance of pretty Lausanne

Tough girl

When we finally reached the top of the hill, I ducked into a Starbucks (which is also reliably open, regardless of the day of the week), to get a snack for the kids, when Alex came running through the door to fetch me: Ella had fallen on the cobblestones and scraped her knee, completely gouging off a scar that had been on her knee from when she was two. Ella decided to look at the bright side.  Maybe this time, when it healed, she wouldn't have a scar?  Looking at all of that all of that drippy blood, I wasn't so sure. And I'd forgotten to put my bandaids back in my purse last night, so we were in a little bit of trouble.


I asked the only mom in sight if she might have a bandaid, and she actually offered to run back home with her kid to get one for us, but Ella was holding up well enough that we felt we didn't need to impose on her.  But we did cut our Old-Town walk short so that we could return to the Hauptbahnhof to look for an open apothecary shop.

Luckily, our trip home was easier: there's a tramway that runs through the length of the city.  If we'd had our wits about us, we would have ridden it uphill, instead, and walked down, but at least we got back and got Ella patched up quickly.

We were close to calling it a day, at that point, but I don't like to end a trip on a low note, and Dennis and I both wanted to at least see the lake before going home.  So we took the tram to the terminus, at Quais d'Ouchy.

That's when things started looking up.  The lakeside was beautiful, and there was playground and several crêperies and ice cream stands open.  The kids ran off, and I took the chance to get some sandwiches and beers for me and Dennis.

I was a little too optimistic, though: we never did get to have the relaxed lunch that we'd hoped for.  Probably because they were worn out, the kids were all being pretty clumsy, and they came to us with one tear-soaked injury after another.  We calmed them down as best we could with my little box of newly-purchased bandaids (an increasingly good investment) and ice cream.

Face-palm: traveling with kids is hard, sometimes.

After Alex got his fingernail stomped on and Ella dropped her ice cream bar, both kids completely lost their enthusiasm for the playground.  So we took them down to the water's edge, where there was an interesting-looking blue tent. Alex ran in first, and called out too us "Look!  It's science!" It turned out that it was part of a little interactive educational center, dealing with Lake Leman and water conservation.  

Water-filtration demo

The old steam ship that we'd noticed near Castle Chillon.

So we let the kids mess around there for a little while, we looked out at the harbor and noticed a festival going on, a couple of miles away, with what has to be the tallest swing ride I've ever seen.  It seemed safer to proceed in the other direction.

So we walked over to the edge of le Parc Olympique. Lausanne is home to the Olympic Museum, which we didn't have time to visit, but we did get a chance to walk around just a little of the green space surrounding the museum grounds. And being there there, more than anything else, made me feel that, maybe, we'll want to take the two-hour ride back to Lausanne later this summer.  It was that beautiful.

Ella spotted paddle boats that came with their own water
slides. Lac Léman is called a tropical lake because the
temperature never drops below five degrees Celsius.  I'm
not sure that's quite warm enough for swimming, but it
did look like a lot of fun.

The cutest ugly ducklings I've ever seen

Joey sat down in the gardens and watched the bees, as if
he were watching any other animal at a zoo.

I think that playing in the gardens was the kids' favorite part of the day: Dennis taught them leapfrog, and I think the moment was cute enough to share:

How I love the trains.  You can't do this in a
minivan.

With all of our time at the park, we ended up staying in Lausanne much longer than we expected, but we still managed to get on a train that would have us back home in time for dinner.  Funnily, even after all of the activity during the day, the boys ran around the playground car for well over half of the train ride.  Maybe they weren't so tired, after all.

But I was.  As much fun as we had,  I think we might stay home next weekend.

I decided Ella had the right idea.