Sunday, Day 2 in Switzerland

I was supposed to write this yesterday, but I went to Station 2 and had a couple beers and a veggie burger for dinner, and thus I lost all motivation to do anything. While I digested that enormous greasy meal, I did watch The King's Speech. It WAS a good movie! I wonder if the book it's based on is any good.

Anyway, the topic of this post is DAY 2 IN SWITZERLAND.

Based on something the owner of the resort told us, we decided to drive to a nearby city called Martigny to see the Combat des Reines. This is a festival involving cows that fight in an ancient Roman amphitheater to display their dominance. The winner gets a sort of parade and a very big bell to wear around her neck. It's not like Spanish bull fight or anything. It's what the cows would do naturally in their pastures. So this sounded like a fun time and we wanted to check it out.

Well we got to Martigny and found a public parking lot. There was a map in the lot, and so we stared at it for a while but didn't understand where anything was. After a few minutes, all these people had gathered in a big group in a parking lot. A little train that was not a train but more like tractor pulling some rolling cars for passengers, pulled into the parking lot, and the crowd of people loaded into the cars. I said, "let's get on the train!" Boyfriend was hesitant, but he followed me.

I figured the train was going to take us to the Combats des Reines, right? Well, we rolled through a beautiful medieval city center and up a mountain. It was a little scary because the turns were very tight and we were riding on little trailers behind a tractor. But it was fun. And when the train stopped, we were at a medieval fortress on top of a mountain. The train tractor driver told me that he'd be back to pick everyone up, so we got out to explore the castle.

When we got inside the castle, there was huge crowd of people and some of them were coming out from inside the castle with plates of food. We were hungry at this point, and I was down with eating some of the food, but we really did not understand what was happening in this place. There was a sign that said the plate of food was 25 francs (that's like $22). People were eating cheese, bread, pickles, grapes, roasted chestnuts, and they were drinking wine. Boyfriend wanted to leave, and I couldn't really argue for why to stay other than it seemed like fun to me, so we left and waited for the train to come back. This all sounds like a waste of time, and mostly is was, but riding on the little tractor train was kind of fun, we got to see the medieval city center, and the views from the top of the mountain were pretty impressive.

View from the top of the mountain in Martigny.

We rode the train back down the mountain and stared at the map again for a while and walked in the direction where the believed the Combats des Reines to be. We arrived at a big gate in front of a space with all these buildings and food stands, and it looked like a festival was happening inside. Again, we didn't understand what was going on. It cost some money to go in. I don't remember how much, 12 francs maybe. So we paid the money at the gate and we went in. Inside, we bought some roasted chestnuts (chestnuts are a big deal here apparently), and we ate them. They were good. Then we wandered around the buildings and tents and realized that this was not where we wanted to be. They were selling things, like flooring, kitchen appliances, telephone service, wine, and an endless number of products that we did not want. We left, grumpy that we had paid money to get in. We were also hungry and thirsty which made the grumpy factor even worse.

Well, we wandered around for quite a while before we found the amphitheater and the Combat des Reines. I asked several people where to go but their directions were not very good (I won't blame my weak French language skills). When we got to the amphitheater, it was crowded. We tried to go in and we were told we had to buy a ticket. It was 20 francs per person to watch the cows fight. Hungry and tired, we decided not to pay that much to see the Combats des Reines. This is a decision I regret now, because I really wanted to see what was going on in there... but we felt too exhausted to handle any more confusion. By this time, it was 4 pm, all the cafes had closed, and we decided to head toward home.

Before we left though, I did get to see some of the cows waiting to go into the amphitheater. They are some pretty impressive beasts. Remember, these are female!

Cows waiting for the Combat des Reines

She looks like a winner to me.

We made up for a stressful day in Martigny when we got back to Champoussin. We drank a lot and ate a lot of fondue and then fell asleep at 8:30. Fondue is like heaven in your mouth.

Next time: Chillon Castle.

Weekend Camping and C&O Heritage Center Visit

It's Monday. I am off work today, and I'm going to write two blog posts. My post-vacation blues were pretty severe last week. I decided I better make this work week a shorter one, so I took a vacation day today to catch up on things like laundry and running errands. And rest. And my blog. And I decided a short autumn camping trip was in order.

And the camping trip did indeed make my ordinary life look a little brighter. The fall colors are at their peak in the mountains. We stayed at the Morris Hill Campground near Lake Moomaw, about a 3 hour drive from Richmond. The campground was just about empty. There were two other families there. I can't believe there were so few people out enjoying the incredible weather over the weekend.

We didn't do anything too exciting on this trip. The idea was to relax. And it was very relaxing. We mostly sat around the campfire and talked to each other. And I drank a lot of beer. I made a really tasty campfire dinner (roasted cauliflower with shallots, grilled chicken thighs, and yellow saffron rice, all cooked to miraculous perfection). When I unfolded our air mattress, it was covered in mold, and so we slept on the hard, cold ground. But I even enjoyed that.

We stopped in Clifton Forge on the way there to visit the C&O Heritage Center. There was some sort of town-wide festival happening in Clifton Forge, which meant there were a lot of people at the museum, but a full staff of volunteers was there to tell us all about the trains and buildings and things. Boyfriend is the train nerd, but I really enjoyed this outing as well.

We got to go inside this old engine. It was pretty neat!

This is all the crazy stuff the engineer had to keep an eye on.

The dining car is lovely. Has a working kitchen and may be rented for events.

I loved the Chessie Cat china in the dining car.

Pretty comfortable, but very close together.

Freight car.

A little desk cubby place in the caboose, for the conductor I guess.

An older caboose.

A beautiful day to visit the C&O Heritage Center.

We were gonna get up early and go fishing at Lake Moomaw on Sunday morning, but we slept in instead (a little too long). On the way home, we stopped in Afton for a visit to the Blue Mountain Brewery. We tasted all the beers they had on tap ($8 for 9 shot glasses of craft beer) and had a very tasty snack. It was a fun visit, but due to the proximity to Charlottesville and UVA, there were a lot of white people with fancy shoes there, which I found distracting in an unwanted sort of way. Blue Mountain makes some great beer (I am especially fond of the seasonal Pumpkin and the Blue Reserve varieties, and they also make a great Virginia Pale Ale). I shall not tell you how much money was spent on the beer we left there with... they're seasonal brews! One of a kind! Artisanal! 

A growler of Blue Mountain's Blue Reserve, on my kitchen counter!

Well, it's after noon now and I better get out of my pajamas. I have to go to Petsmart for cat supplies. Butter Bean is something like 14 in cat years, and her teenage qualities are pretty extreme. I am hoping that buying a new scratching post will distract her from scratching up the couch. I'm such a cat slave.

I'm back! Saturday in Switzerland

I have returned from the Big Swiss Adventure! We got back on Saturday night. I had a lovely time. Nothing substantial went wrong. All events happened relatively smoothly. It was a wonderful vacation. I feel like I ate several pounds of cheese last week, because I did. I made a kale, bean, and turkey sausage soup last night with the hopes that I'd feel less gross after eating something so full of fiber. I think it worked but my schedule is still off and I fell asleep at 8:30 last night. I'm sure I'll be back to normal by the end of the week.

I didn't blog from Switzerland because I have a huge laptop and it was too much trouble to lug it along with me. So now I'll write down the details I most want to remember. And I have some pictures too, of course.

On the Saturday of our arrival, we were very tired and grumpy after a horrendously uncomfortable 7-hour plane ride from D.C. to Geneva. We left at 5 pm (our time) and arrived at 8 am (their time). So it felt like 3 am or so as we obtained our rental car and set off onto the Swiss roadways. This was initially quite scary. Boyfriend did all the driving and found the first day of adjusting to European highways a little stressful. But we were thrilled to be off the airplane, even in our exhaustion. We drove from the airport toward our resort in Valais, along beautiful Lake Geneva. It was a foggy morning, and the humidity felt good after being in the plane. The hillsides were covered in vineyards, and I got to enjoy the amazing views as Boyfriend adjusted to kilometers and traffic circles.

We stopped in Lausanne around lunchtime to eat and see the sights. Driving and parking felt very stressful in Lausanne, but we got a parking spot and we wandered through the city's center. It was market day. People were selling fruits and pastries in little stands. There were giant figs that impressed me very much. We had trouble getting francs from the ATM. My card wouldn't work at all (we still don't know why, because it worked two days later). Boyfriend was able to get 200 francs and so we went to have lunch at Manora Restaurant, which I had read about before our trip. It took us a good while before we found Manora because it is in a crazy huge department store called Manor. Manor was I think 7 stories tall and included a grocery store and departments for furniture, home goods, women's clothing, men's clothing, shoes, children's things... and on the top floor, there was Manora Restaurant, a self-service place crowded with Swiss people on market day. Boyfriend found it to be a bit overwhelming, but we found him a chicken salad sandwich that made him very happy. It was the best chicken salad sandwich I'd ever tasted. I had eggplant pizza and salad and fruit for dessert. We ate it on the restaurant's patio and watched little birds beg for food. A Swiss boy with a toy sword also made faces at us while we ate.

  

After lunch, we visited a church, which I thought was the Cathedral de Notre-Dame, but I later discovered that it was not. Well, it was a nice church anyway...

 

Then we were back on the road and driving toward our "resort" in Champoussin. We got lost once and accidentally went up a mountain, which was beautiful. We also stopped at a Coop grocery store to pick up some cheese, bread, eggs, and microwavable meals. I had refused to spend $75 on a GPS for a week, but luckily our little rental car came with navigation. It was a necessity. 

We finally arrived in Champoussin at 5:00-ish, and we were mighty happy to find ourselves near a bed. The apartment we stayed in was in a ski resort that we booked through RCI. I would not recommend it or stay there again, but we spent such a short amount of time in our apartment, it didn't much matter. And we did have a beautiful view from our little chalet apartment. 

On Saturday evening, we ate bread and cheese for dinner and explored our TV channels (mostly in French in German). Then we fell asleep at 7:30. Next time... SUNDAY! And a story about the city of Martigny.

Field Day of the Past, with a Cat Update

Well, the cat tree still isn't done. It is almost done though.  All that's left to do is to carpet the base. Butter Bean is still mostly uninterested in the tree, I think because she's so small. When she's feeling especially feisty, she'll scramble up one of the legs and then scramble back down. A couple times, I've come in the apartment to find her sleeping on top of the tube platform, but she doesnt play on it in front of me.

She is looking and feeling a lot better. She's back to being an active and happy kitten, following the dog around and batting at his tail relentlessly. There is still plenty of ringworm on her, but it is healing.

See the bald spots on her toes? They were really bald, but there's fur growing back now. And the dark spots on her nose and head are also ringworm rashes, but they look much better than they did.

So what did we do this weekend if we didn't finish the cat tree? We filled our weekend with classic Virginia redneck events, including a Kiwanis fundraiser BBQ/car show in Ashland (so lame I am not going to elaborate) and a visit to Field Day of the Past in Goochland. I hadn't been to Field Day of the Past since I was a teenager, but Boyfriend got free tickets from a work acquaintance. It was fun! It was like the state fair, but with a more local, less creepy feeling to it. There were funnel cakes and roasted corn, and lots of interesting historical exhibits. I had a good time. We watched tractor pulls and saw lots of old-time machines and thingamajigs like these:

 

But more importantly, there were chickens, mules, donkeys (and miniature donkeys), horses (and miniature horses), cows (and miniature cows), ducks, pigs, and alpacas: 

Boyfriend's Birthday Tinged with Ringworm Blues

Well, last week was a difficult one for work reasons, and this one has been rough for personal reasons. It's a good time to remind myself that the Swiss adventure is a mere 3 weeks away.

Boyfriend's birthday weekend was nice. His parents took us to dinner at Farmer Johnson's Country Kitchen on Saturday.  We had never been there, but we found a flyer/menu at Farm to Family Market, and we were interested in giving it a try. It was a bit disappointing to walk in and discover that Farmer Johnson's is a self-service restaurant, where you order at the counter and pour your own drinks at a fountain. We were quite looking forward to having a nice sit-down type meal. The food was good though. Fries are shoe-string. My chicken sandwich was unsurprising but good.

After dinner, I took Boyfriend out for cocktails and dessert at The Roosevelt, a new neighborhood place that is every bit as lovely as we expected it to be. I should have taken pictures! I forgot. Oh well. We had fancy $9 cocktails (what a splurge), and I ordered the Buttermilk Panna Cotta and Boyfriend had Peanut Butter Pie. Mine was super delicious, but I totally was jealous of the Peanut Butter Pie. My Panna Cotta was served in a small Mason Jar, topped with fresh blueberries, served with a small spoon for easy scooping. Such a creamy treat. But that pie was phenomenal. We can't wait to try the Roosevelt for dinner. We went at 8:30 on a Saturday and had to wait to even get a spot at the bar, so I imagine we'll be going on a weekday once we recover financially from the upcoming vacation. 

We had a bonfire on Sunday night, which was fun but my description of it would be uninteresting to most people. S'mores replaced birthday cake. People shared good beer with us. I made a nice grilled cabbage. What I did was this. Use these ingredients:

A little more than half a cabbage, chopped to desired size for eating
Several pats of butter
A couple squirts of soy sauce

Put the ingredients in an aluminum foil packet (I actually made two packets), and put them on a hot grill for about 25 minutes. I cooked mine on a metal structure above an open fire. Good cabbage!

Boyfriend's birthday week was tainted, unfortunately, by the illness of dear kitten Butter Bean. The vet diagnosed her with ringworm. She had several bald rashes that spread and multiplied, so I took her to the vet, and we found out after cuddling and kissing her for two weeks that she was covered in fungus. I am now also infected, and I've got a few tiny ringworm rashes the size of a dime. I've been able to treat the infections right away so it hasn't been a big deal, but it has required a lot of energy. The vet told me to quarantine the kitten. Where am I supposed to put her? I have a one bedroom apartment! Well, I kept her in the bathroom for two days and she meowed constantly and got all worked up over the ringworm treatment so she got the shits, of course. Then she peed on the floor and there was blood in her urine, which scared me tremendously, so we were back at the vet right away. Ugh. Butter Bean has had a seriously rough week. If it's been stressing me out, imagine how she must feel.

So she has a bladder infection and she's on an antibiotic now. Several of the ringworm rashes are improving. I failed at keeping her in quarantine because it simply wasn't worth it. I'm worried that having to give her medicine, dip her in a stinky sulfur bath, and pour stinging anti-fungal meds on her skin is harming our bond. I want to be able to cuddle her and let her crawl all over the place. I can't wait for her to be better.

We are going to finish the cat tree tomorrow. I will post about it soon, really! We have borrowed a big suitcase from Boyfriend's parents. Looking at it standing in the living room makes me feel so excited for our trip.