How the mighty have fallen. I’m sitting here in our Geneva flat, in the bed/living/dining/tv/everything-but-kitchen-and-bath room, slugging down of a glass of Spiez’s finest red, unwinding from what has been the hardest drive – and the last – of the entire 600 miles in Switzerland. I’m not going to bore you with the detailed price comparison, but let’s just say that a bottle of wine delivered to our Le Mirador suite cost almost as much as one night in Geneva. Our dining room table from Le Mirador, or Spiez, for that matter, would pretty much fill up the entire living space here.

Not that I’m complaining – this was the best Old Town deal we could find several months ago and it does appear to be in the center of everything. We will fall out the front door into a sidewalk café for dinner. And the walk from the parking garage would have been OK if we didn’t have so much stuff crammed into one suitcase. We left the other one and a backpack in the car.

We left Le Mirador this morning around 11 AM (we’re still in Spiez goof-off mode when it comes to getting up in the morning). Nice breakfast overlooking Lake Geneva and a scenic drive over farm hills to the superhighway at Lausanne.

The GPS took us to CERN, home of the Large Haldron Collider.  I’ll spare you the mathematical details that define how it works but suffice it to say they accelerate protons to darn near the speed of light by sending them around a circular track almost 18 miles long – some going clockwise and some counterclockwise. Magnets do the acceleration trick. The magnets are super cooled to near absolute zero and the protons travel in a vacuum. When they get going fast enough BANG, they collide. There are detectors that measure whatever results from the collision, hopefully particles that no one has ever seen before but that theory says should exist – or not – which leads to more theorizing and experimentation.

In my experience, most four- to six-year-old boys, and some older ones, get their kicks smashing things to bits to see what happens. Makes you wonder about physicists.

Our tour guide was an interesting gal – final year of her PhD in physics at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. She was a great guide except that her enthusiasm for the work drew her deeper into the weeds than most of the audience was prepared to go. I asked her to tell us in 25 words or less what her thesis research was all about. Several hundred words later, it boiled down to statistical methods to separate truth from noise. You may see a pattern in the junk thrown off by the zillions of collisions you’ve observed, but how do you know it points to something real, rather than being happenstance. It’s the old problem of sitting an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters and letting them type forever. Eventually, they’ll type the collected works of Shakespeare – with no typos! Is that a sign of intelligence or just sheer chance?

The drive from CERN, on the north side of Geneva maybe 15 miles, was a killer. Lots of traffic, a lot of the traffic being motorcycles and bicycles that paid no attention to lane markers or traffic lights. But somehow we made it and even entered the parking lot on the first shot. Hence the wine.

It’s seven and Judy says we’d better do the dinner thing. I’ll report back when we’ve broken bread and hit another go on the wine bottle.

Dinner was great – just up the street – veal and chicken. Just took forever to pay the bill.

As for yesterday at Le Meridian. We each had a “relaxing” massage the afternoon of our arrival, so we awoke still in the relaxation mode. Late breakfast on the patio overlooking the lake then a leisurely stroll up the hill to the funicular station.

As I think I mentioned before, Judy and I arrived on our honeymoon via the funicular. The best I can figure, we took a train from the Geneva airport to Lausanne, transferred to a different train that took us to Vevey and the funicular. We wanted to retrace our steps.

The ride down was smooth and pleasant. The old wooden cars have been replaced with modern plastic models and everything is fully automated. We never saw a human to sell or check our tickets. Very much on the honor system.

We were reliving the experience, in English, and a man sitting across from us, as we left the train in Vevey, offered several suggestions about trains and then sights we really should see in Vevey and within an easy bicycle ride of town. The Charlie Chaplin Museum was nearby, as was the site of the Gustave Eiffel (the tower guy) summer place (there’s a plaque commemorating the spot). He was on his way to swim laps but went out of his way to show us where to go.

We ended up taking a nice stroll along the lakeshore, but I was driven to find the rail station from which we alit on our arrival 50 years ago. It took several wrong turns and more walking than Judy would put up with. She sat on a bench and watched one funicular departure after another while I did my searching thing. Turns out, the railway station is right across the street from the funicular station, in plain sight.

We ordered up a bottle of wine of the type Judy had liked at the fondu joint, had it delivered to our room, and sat on our balcony with that and some cheese and crackers left over from Spiez. Satisfying.

In the afternoon we had two competing needs: to relax, read, enjoy the scenery and take a nap and to climb Mont Pelerin. Guess who drew the short straw and climbed the mountain? Judy did fairly well with her tasks but failed to get in the nap.

My journey up the hill went OK but I took a route that lengthened the trip to a four-mile, three-hour journey. I had Google Maps, All Trails, a printed map from the hotel and a couple of ambiguous road signs. None of them agreed, but eventually I figured it out (you just climb up until you reach the top, right?). The views were magnificent and the exercise made me feel much better.

Dinner last night was at the hotel. Delicious tastes with sunset over the lake to make it even more enjoyable.

So now tomorrow we’ll see the sights of Geneva. Rain is forecast for the next few days so there may be some museum time in our future, but maybe we’ll get lucky, again, and dodge the downpours.

 

September 4, 2022 Pictures

September 5, 2022 Pictures