Road Trip!! Lyon to Chîllon...BTW, that rhymes ;)

Day 3: Lyon, France to Zurich, Switzerland (via Chîllon, Switzerland)
Driving Time: 3 hours, 58 minutes
Distance: 358 km

We were up and on the road relatively early on Sunday, ready to head northeast toward the Swiss border. We got on the autoroute and paid the last of the extortive French tolls (sometimes as much as 14 euro for one stretch of freeway!) before crossing into Switzerland. It was another lax border crossing. We could have imported wine, duty free, to our heart's content, and might have if we weren't going back to the US soon.

Just north of Geneva, we pulled over at a gas station to fuel up on another 60 euro tank of gas (that's $76 USD)...what a bargain! Soon after, we saw signs for Château de Chîllon, our destination for the day. We followed the signs incorrectly and went straight to the lake front instead of heading north along the lake road through Montreaux as we should have, and ended up in a little town called Vévey. We parked right by the lakefront-walk of the town, which was bustling given that it was a sunny (but crisp) day. We decided it was a good place to stop for lunch to enjoy the scenery so we found a little sandwich shop and ate on a park bench facing the lake.

Fully fortified, we got headed on the right road and drove the 15 minutes through Montreaux (home of the world-famous jazz festival) and to the castle.

Originally built in the 12th century, the castle at Chîllon is supposed to be one of the best presered in all of Europe. It's beautiful location jutting out over Lake Geneva also make it a real crowd pleaser. When you visit, the entry price includes a little self-guided tour booklet with very interesting information on the castle that made for exactly the right lenght tour for our attention spans.

First stop is the dungeon, where a famous Count was imprisioned for five years, chained to one of the stone pillars. Sucky as that must have been, at least he had a good view! The other notable feature of the dungeon is that Byron (poet, political crusader, etc.) scratched his name into one of the pillars.

Next we went upstairs to the main living areas of the castle, where the people who weren't imprisioned hung out. There were some nice window seats and balconies looking out over the lake and into the garden courtyard.

Even the room with the latrines had a nice view:

On the back of the castle are the defensive fortifications and towers facing the mountains, which you can climb across and up to for a better view of the whole building.

After we wrapped up our visit to the château, it was time to start heading north toward the dog who was in Burghalden for the weekend. Burghalden is at the southern tip of Lake Zürich, near the town of Rapperswil, about 35-40 minutes from Zürich city. We'd never actually driven to the dog sitter's house, only taken the train, so this was going to be an adenture. Looking at the map, there was no good way to get from where we were to where we wanted to go, so we kind of weaved our way across Switzerland. The scenery was super-Swiss indeed, we just needed some yodeling sheep-herders to come walking through.

We pretty much drove right to where Baxter was "vacationing" for the weekend and were quite impressed with ourselves. Then, back home to Pfirsichstrasse 17!