Cheese and Castles and Chocolates, Oh My!

Well, we've lost track of the days, so I can't say "Day such and such was amazing!", but whichever day this was was quite an adventure for us. We traveled to the town of Gruyeres, where they make the delicious cheese. (We learned that the reason the cheese is so delicious is because the cows eat over 75 different kinds of plants and grasses, including the vanilla orchid.) We learned this from our cow guide, Cherry. I highly recommend a visit to Gruyeres. The cheese factory is fun, and we learned a lot. There is a very cool medival town to walk around, complete with a castle, which we had fun touring.

From Gruyeres, we took the train to Broc, which is home of the chocolate factory. As soon as you get off of the train in Broc, you can smell the chocolate. I don't know if it's naturally that way, or if they are pumping the smell into the train station, but it made me drool! We walked to the chocolate factory. Now this place was amazing because it was FREE. And the best part of the tour was that we got to sample as many different kinds, and as many pieces of chocolate as we wanted. (I thought this was marketing genius because the chocolate is sooo rich, that really you can only stomach about 4 pieces. Well, OK, Eric had 6, but you see what I mean.) There must have been 25 - 30 different kinds of chocolate to sample. It's a bummer that we felt so ill after only a couple of pieces.

From the chocolate factory, we went on a long walk uphill, which prompted me to ponder these two questions: Why is it that everything we visit in Switzerland is up a steep hill? And why is it that the sun is always shining directly on us as we hike up these hills? But I digress...

We were trying to find a restaurant to eat some real food, because at this point we only had cheese and chocolate in our bellies. (I forgot to mention that at the cheese factory, they give you a pack of cheese, 3 pieces of various ages. Yummy!) But we couldn't find a restaurant at all, so we got back on the train and headed to Bulle.

Bulle was another unexpected gem. From the train station we could tell that it was a larger town, and probably had a restaurant. But it wasn't until we got to the main street that we saw just how big a town it was, complete with its own castle. We had a wonderful, leisurely time, wandering around and getting a steak dinner. It started to pour rain (we are learning that the mornings are the beautiful time of day and that the rains come in the afternoon-early evening.)

We made it back to Lausanne and have found a place to upload our pictures. So if you didn't notice, we added pictures to our two blogs from yesterday. Hope all is well with everyone. Love and miss you!