Saturday October 22, Geneva, Switzerland

Although our room at ETAP cost only 37 Euro, it came complete with a Continental breakfast. Unfortunately, it turned out to be the French version with just bread and rolls plus beverages rather than the German version with lots of solid food like we had enjoyed on the Astor. I was amused to note that the signs above our lunch counter specifically prohibited bringing German Shepherds in, but apparently allowed people to bring in green elephants! All I can say is that those folks were awfully lucky that very few pet elephants are green; can you imagine the mess? In any event we were on the road by 9 o'clock, driving north to Geneva, Switzerland. The sky was covered with dark stratus clouds that showered us with various amounts of rain as we drove along, and that was a shame as I'm sure it was some of the prettiest countryside in the world. Our hope was that the rain would clear off by the time we reached Geneva so that we could walk a bit in the city, and that gamble paid off.

The Swiss make their priorities clear right off the bat when you cross their border. They never even glanced at our passports, but they insisted on immediate, up front payment of 30 Euro for some kind of road tax before they would let us drive into their country. Right across the border we reached Geneva and worked our way downtown to a parking lot. Unfortunately the parking limit was only 90 minutes, so our visit to Geneva was necessarily brief. On the other hand, the rain had stopped and the cloud layer was slowly breaking up, which gave us a nice view of the city. The Rhone River flows out of Lac Leman at Geneva, and we followed it upstream a couple of blocks to get to the harbor area. Along the way we found an ATM machine at a bank and used one of our credit cards to obtain 100 Swiss Francs so we could buy some lunch. This was the first time we had to cope with changing currency as we crossed a national border, and it brought back not-so-fond memories of the Bad Old Days in pre-EU Europe when we just went crazy changing currency every time we crossed a border to the next country.

Down at the harbor we saw ferries shuttling back and forth and a huge jet of water pushing over 100 feet into the sky that was particularly impressive when the sun turned it into a giant column of frothy white foam. Coming back from the harbor we found a very nice lakeside park with a pretty fountain featuring bronze Rodin-esque statues representing the four seasons. A huge garden clock nearby was constructed entirely from flowers; it apparently had to be completely replanted every spring and summer as well as the daily weeding and watering. A lot of work that is, I'm sure, but it was nice to see such a pretty result.

By that point we had run out of our parking time, so we had to rush off without seeing more of Geneva, which I regretted. We continued our drive along the north shore of Lac Leman toward Lausanne, hoping to find a place to stay the night, but instead we found the National Museum of Switzerland at Chateau de Prangins and decided to visit that. The chateau was a very nice example of French architecture in the 17th-18th centuries, rather impractical as a house nowadays but just the thing for a museum. Out in back they had also maintained the formal gardens from the old days, and right next door was a small town with a pretty old church, and inn. What a nice setting for a historical museum.

The museum covered Swiss history basically from the time of the Enlightenment up to the 1920s or so. I was very surprised to learn that Switzerland was not nearly as uniform and cohesive a country as I had always thought. The 4 official languages and stresses between Protestants and Catholics had apparently created quite difficult conditions for forming a modern nation state. Along the way Switzerland suffered armed revolts and near civil war several times, although they had managed to stay out of both World Wars, which could be considered a plus or a minus depending on your point of view.

The exhibits on technology in general and the Swiss watch and clock-making industry in particular were wonderful. Several old clocks and watches were also on display. Monika was intrigued by one old clock with multiple faces that apparently showed different time zones. I wondered if it was one clock mechanism linked to several displays or several independent clocks inside the common housing, but I could not tell from the description.

I also saw some pristine examples of old typewriters, telephones, dictating machines, telephone switchboards, and associated items from the industrial age. I never knew, for example, that the first dictation machines used wax cylinders to record the voice. They also displayed a telegraph key and what I think was a paper tape recorder or repeater for telegraph messages.

A room concerning developments in hygiene was fascinating not only because it held an old tin bathtub but it also had an old dentists chair and drill and a 1920s era shower. The dentist's drill was so old that it was powered by a foot treadle just like an old Singer sewing machine, but the thought of the dentist pushing on that while trying to keep the drill steady when drilling out a cavity just sent shivers up my spine. I suppose I'm one of the few Americans who had their teeth drilled without Novocain back in the 1950s (it cost extra then, as I remember), and the pain really could be quite excruciating. The old shower was also interesting, in part because of its metal tube construction and in part because it featured a big temperature control valve that controlled the mix of hot and cold water, something that I had thought was a more modern invention.

As you might have guessed, I really liked that museum; it had 44 rooms of permanent exhibits, and each room had an overview in French, German, Italian, and English as well as detailed brochures on the exhibited items that were also in the different languages. Although I would have been satisfied with just having German, the availability of the English versions made it very easy to just read, read, and read about the exhibits, stopping only to take pictures.

Leaving the museum much later that afternoon we drove along a 2-lane road from Geneva towards Lausanne and found out that the nice bicycle path we had seen in Geneva continued in that direction for about 30 kilometers. Someone in Switzerland, or Geneva at least, really likes bicycles because we saw free lending bicycles at a small stand on the edge of the harbor side park in downtown Geneva. Thus, one way to see Geneva and not have to rent a car would be to take a bus downtown, walk to the harbor, borrow a bicycle from that stand, and then pedal around town. You could also pedal about half the distance to Lausanne on the bike path although after that you'd have to share the road with cars, which would be quite a bit less safe in my opinion. I didn't have time to read the rules and restrictions on the use of the bicycles, but I'm pretty sure they are basic 1-speed bicycles with fat tires and coaster brakes, so they ought to be reasonably comfortable if not as efficient as multi-speed bicycles.

Our great time at the museum turned out in the end to come at an unexpectedly high price. We searched for a hotel room as we drove toward Lausanne, only to find that every place we tried was solidly booked up for the night. The only exception was a run down, seedy looking place where the proprietor demanded cash in advance, and Monika decided we weren't that desperate. We may be fine at a 0-star hotel like ETAP, but having a hotel demand cash in advance or renting by the hour are two of the danger signals we have learned not to ignore. In the end, however, we had to make a U-turn and drive back to the airport at Geneva to find a place at the Crowne Plaza there. They had a vacant room thank goodness, but it was quite expensive and a distinct jolt to be suddenly in the lap of 5-star luxury after the ETAP Hotel of the previous night!. Still, we had enjoyed a wonderful afternoon driving through quaint Swiss towns while watching the lake and the fall colors of the trees and vineyards, plus the enjoyment of a nice, solid museum. We were too tired to go out, so we just ate some snacks for dinner and took turns using the computer and reading until it was time to go to bed for the night.