Back from Europe!

Wow! What an amazing trip we had...Everything went very smoothly, only one train mishap and that 's not to bad for me planning the whole thing myself...My daughter, who is eight, did really well. I was worried it may be too much for her, all of the travelling, strange foods and foreign languages, etc. but she did great. She can speak better Italian than me! We started off landing in Milan, Italy. We got immediately on a train and went to Lugano, Switzerland where we stayed for our first night to recover from the long trip and get acclimated to the new time zone. Lugano was a beautiful city which felt much more Italian than Swiss due to it's location so close to the Italian border...The town itself had great shopping, wonderful food and was very picturesque sitting on the edge of Lake Lugano. Here is a photo from the boat ride we took around the lake.

This the beautiful town of Morcote on Lake Lugano

Next, we travelled by train to Lucerne, Switzerland. Lucerne is a lovely city with a really beautiful Old Town section. The langauge turned to German here, which we are not very familiar with unfortunately. We found some people who spoke English, but not many...We had a terrible nights sleep our first night there...some soccer team had TIED some other soccer team and I kid you not...drunk Swiss men stayed up until 4am in the morning singing victory songs outside our window...what a trip that was...they definately know how to party!The town of Lucerne

We took a day trip the next day to two different mountains...One is called Mt. Titlis and the other is Mt. Pialtus. Mt. Titlis is 10,000 feet high and is covered in snow 365 days a year. You start out at the base in green meadows and end up at a frozen glacier! The temp. on the ground that day was 65 degrees and 28 degrees at the top. This was my first cable car ride since I was a kid and OMY it scared the living daylights out of me! I am afraid of heights so I don't know what the hell I was thinking...The first cable car was the worst because it is really small and only seats about 4 people. It swings and rocks a lot...The second and third ones to the top weren't so bad because they held about 25 people and felt much more substantial....Once we reached the top it felt like you were in heaven...above the clouds! Very cool and worth the near heart attack.

I will try and post some more photos later...for some reason Blogger will not let me upload any more photos right now....