Gruyere Castle etc.

So my very wonderful, nice, lovely friend Kathrin again invited me for an outing, and again volunteered her family to babysit my kids.  I loooooove Kathrin!  We had a sensational time, and we got to see some really cool castles and some art and some cute little towns, and chat and chat and chat.  When I picked up the kids, they had had dinner, so when I got home with them I put them straight to bed (7:30) without even brushing teeth or anything (they were very tired), and Brett had made dinner and we ate it together by ourselves and then Brett did the dishes.  Really, can a day better than that even exist?

So, here is what we did.  We started out by going to Gruyere, in the midst of the Fribourg foothills in the French-speaking part of Switzerland.  And we toured the Castle which has been there since, oh, about 1270.  “The tour of the castle offers a walk through eight centuries of architecture, history, and culture.”

  Grue means crane in French, so that is where the names Gruyeres came from and they were all over the place.

      This room- the Knights’ Room- had paintings of the history of the castle over all it’s walls.  It was very impressive. 

There were art exhibitions in some places, and these are some pieces I thought were cool.  This giant has the Gruyeres Castle on his head, but he doesn’t seem to notice, as he’s contemplating a tomato.

The three below were by the same artist, who had an exhibition.  I thought they were very cool, and they reminded me of James C. Christensen.  I’m pretty sure his name is Thomas Woodruff.    We walked down from the castle a different way, and we were noting that we had just discussed on the way there our lack of directional sense, yet we did find the car in the end.  :)

Then we stopped in Avenches, where there are ruins of a Roman amphitheater.  So that was cool, but unfortunately the museum was closed because it was a Monday and many museums are not open on Mondays. Then we went to a town called Murten.

We walked around in the battlement, which was pretty sweet.

    They have pretty gardens in what used to be the moat.

It was so fun.  It was also very cold.  It was by far the coldest day we’d had in a long time.  We had planned on doing quite a long hike, but decided against it.  And when we went to Bern together earlier, it was the coldest day in a while.  So obviously we need to go somewhere again and break the cold trend.  Sounds good to me.