Shopps in Switzerland: Festivals, festivals, festivals!

The Swiss LOVE their festivals! To celebrate Travis's finishing the school year we went for an overnight in Lucerne, Switzerland. It is in the German-speaking part of Switzerland and it's distinctive feature is the covered wooden bridge that goes across the river through town. We were there during "Lucernefest" which is their summer festival.

The streets were closed to cars and packed with pedestrians getting drunker by the minute-not the typical place you might want to be with kids, but they hung in there great! We also realized it would have been a good time to have a double stroller, but since we don't have one, Savannah sitting on Travis's lap worked almost as well! Plus it enabled her to quickly jump down and dance to the music which she did frequently!

The festivities went late into the night, and the kids got to see fireworks close up for the first time. We decided they would count as our 4th of July fireworks and they were some of the best fireworks we have ever seen!

During our visit we also went to the Swiss Transportation Museum which is huge and was a great hit with the kids-I highly recommend it! This is us inside a space shuttle and Travis driving a security van. :)

We also did some other site-seeing around the city which included getting bratwurst of course, and visiting a glacier museum and a natural history museum. It was a great trip!

Back in Vevey they were also celebrating the end of the school year with a "Fete-Ecole" which for some reason was kicked off by a cannon going off repeatedly for 30 minutes at 6:00 am 300 feet from our house! But more fun was the carnival rides that they had in the square, it reminded us of the end scene of Grease!

Another big festival going on right now is the Montreux Jazz Festival. It brings all kinds of big names-the headliner is Prince. The festival brings folks from all over-it was the most English we had heard in one place since we have been here! We enjoyed a very relaxed vibe listening to music outside while the kids played on a playground.

Though it clearly was too much for Savannah eventually!

Finally, not related to festivals, but Ryan ran in Les Rochers De Naye this past weekend that was a 10k that went straight up a mountain! He got some great shots and he finished the race-major achievement!