October 11 – 14, 2013

Not wanting to leave the farm just yet, we stayed through the morning milking. Once last time with the ladies, Alex and Matilda before it was officially time to be on our way. We didn’t really know what we wanted to do, so we decided to head to Chamonix-Mont Blanc.

Our roadtrip turned out to be a little less exciting than planned. We spent 2 days driving to Chamonix which turned out to be cloudy and snowing. We were unable to get a clear view of the mountain and were not able to camp in the area, because we didn’t have gear for camping in the cold weather. We figured we would keep driving until we found a place to camp and went up and over a mountain, into Switzerland.

The Aiguille du Midi

A dam high in the hills

Our first view of Switzerland

The filter brings out the colors

It was raining really hard once we got down out of the mountains in Switzerland, but beautiful. There were absolutely no campgrounds open so, we figured we would just do a little loop around Lake Geneva and head back into France.

On our way towards Paris we headed to Riems. Riems is a historically important city. The unconditional surrender of Germany to General Eisenhower and the Allies occurred in Riems in 1945. We spent an hour or two in a small museum dedicated to the incident. The room that the actual event took place in has been preserved and we were able to get a good look at it.

The Map Room

A surrender souvenir

Airplane remains

Riems is also home to the impressive cathedral, Notre-Dame de Reims. The current cathedral was built in 1211 to replace an earlier version. The previous cathedral was built in the 400s. It is crazy to imagine that a cathedral has occupied the same site for almost 2000 years.

Notre-Dame de Reims

Gargoyles

Beautiful details

After a lovely afternoon in Riems, we headed in the direction of Paris through the Champagne region to pick up a bottle of bubbly.

Champagne region

We had a hotel room for our last night in Europe. It was nice to have a dry, large area to make sure our boxes were properly packed and strong enough to handle a few flights.