20th July 2012 8.15pm

Today we visited the Basel Zoo. It was a good day, spent among the gardens and seeing the animals. Here are a selection of what we have seen.

Angel fish

miniture goats

storks in their nest

giraffes

yes well, a stripey thing(oh dear!)

cheetah

scarlet ibis

zebra

20th July 2012

Here are some photos of where we went yesterday, which was our youngsest son's birthday. We had a really good day and I hope you did too Ryan. The photo above was the first red squirrel we have seen. It was on the ground when we first saw it, and it collected a nut and went up the tree with it to eat. We were able to get lots of photos of it.

Here is Malcolm at the Basler Papiermuhle, that is the Basel Paper Mill. Here he is seen marbling a sheet of paper. This mill was interesting as it still uses the water wheel to power some of the machinery. It also had captions in English which helped. All the machinery was old, the tubs they soaked the pulp in was chipped out of a block of limestone.

Uta took us to Dornach for tea. The top photo is the view from the restaurant and the second is the restaurant as seen from the road below. I tried a local barley soup, was it good. I have taken note of the name and will try to find a recipe for it. While we were sitting here we could see the planes coming in to land at the airport. Shame we have to move along again on Sunday as it is really nice here.

 

This is Schloss Dorneck, a ruined castle we passed on the way to the restaurant. After tea we walked back down to it and had a look. The views here were just superb, you could see right over Basel and to the Swiss alps.

19th July 2012

Hello,
 Malcolm and I are in Switzerlandand have been here since Friday. It is all you could imagine it to be, it is just so beautiful. On Saturday we took the train to Zurich, it takes an hour to get there. We spent the morning looking through a museum, and the afternoon walking along the river banks which are all gardens and parks.
Sunday a friend took us to Laufen which was a half hour drive away. We spent the day walking in the mountains. There are paths everywhere, and it is obviously a very popular pasttime as there were a lot of people out walking. Some of the mountains are very steep but is so very beautiful.
Here are some of the photos from Sunday:

Monday we spent walking around the old town area of Basel, which is on the Rhine.

Until next time,keep well.

view from the lighthouse of Lake Como

                                                from the walk along Lake Lugano

view from the railway station in Lugano

this is a footbridge in Lucern

We are now in Switzerland, yesterday we travelled on the scenic train from Lugano to Lucern. Today we are doing a boat trip on a paddle steamer on Lake Lucern. More photos to be taken. Here are a few from Como, Lugano and Lucern.