Liechtenstein

In 9th grade, I took my first German class in High School with Frau Davis. In our book there was a section on the very tiny country of Liechtenstein, and each of the students had to stand up in class and do a short presentation on the country - with the information we learned from our book.

So here's what I knew before going to Liechtenstein - they had a king, a postage stamp museum and a castle (where the aforementioned King lived.) So of course when we were deciding where to go on our driving trip of Switzerland - I mentioned that it might not be that far to drive to Liechtenstein. And happily Meghan and Bruce agreed. So we rented a pretty sweet Audi station wagon (with a navigation system - which came in handy when driving through a very busy, very under construction Zurich.)

When we got to Liechtenstein - we drove into Vaduz and the first thing we saw was the castle and as it turns out the royal family was home because the flag was flying. Then we found a parking spot. We stopped by the information booth, where they happily stamped our passport for 3 Swiss Francs.

Then we had lunch - and let me suggest that despite being done with pizza do not order the hamburger in Liechtenstein - it's not their specialty by far. Thankfully - Meghan shared her pizza with me. Then we headed down to the stamp museum to see what was happening there and it was pretty much off-the-hook (well it was quiet and small - and free.) We bought a couple postcards and stamps so we could mail some postcards - one that is headed to Frau Davis - because without her there I would never have thought about going to Liechtenstein in the the first place.

After sending our postcards we looked at the tourist map and found what was up the largest hill and went to find it - because our theme for this trip "uphill." We have managed to climb all the largest hills in every city we have visited - I am not sure what this means for Venice. We found some kids selling lemonade and I managed to make a very poor deal for Meghan and bought two 1.50 cakes for 5 Francs - well as it turns out I cannot do math while speaking German. However, it wasn't as bad as it first sounds - my first deal was for three - but Bruce didn't want one.

Then we headed back to Zurich to go to our hotel. However, we booked the Zurich Moevinpick hotel that was not actually in Zurich but 15 minutes outside of the city. Which is where the GPS came in handy - after we called the hotel to get coordinates.

Which then created a change in our original plan which was to hang out in Zurich the next day - but since we were so far out of the city we decided to go see the Capitol of Switzerland - Bern - instead. We went into town - thinking that we were going to see the Bears - well as it turns out that at least one of the bears are dead - and the other bears aren't there. So we wandered around the Old Town and took notice of a very interesting statue of an ogre eating a chubby baby. But it was also August 1st - which is Swiss day and everything was closed (pretty much everywhere) except the museums. It was also about 90 degrees which was very hot. So we ended up going to the Einstein Museum - it showed not only Einstein's life but how it fit into the history of the 20th century. It was not only very air conditioned but very interesting.

Then we headed back to Geneva and ended our day with a fireworks display next to the Jet d'eau. It was quite an adventure and a lot of fun - we waited for an hour to see the fireworks - the whole time Bruce swore that there weren't any - but our rationale was there are hundreds of other people standing looking towards the lake - there has to be something going on. It was a really cool way to cap off a fun day.