Having not had anything to eat for dinner, I woke up ravenous. Cameron and I walked to the nearest grocery store to buy some things for breakfast, muffins, yogurt, and saltine crackers for the prego.  When we got back I ate a muffin and then went back to bed.  Richard did a great job of packing and gathering on his own, but we got a late start out of Milan.  

The drive from Milan to Interlaken was the most scenic drive of our whole trip.  We drove up over the Italian Alps, straight into the Swiss Alps.  It was cloudy and rainy again, so I couldn’t ever get any pictures to do justice to the beauty and majesty of those epic mountains.  But we would drive up and down switchbacks, and then from high up the mountain you could look down into the Swiss villages, it was straight out of a travel brochure.  

At one point we stopped to fill up with petrol in one of the villages and across the street there was a charming restaurant. The village was so quiet and still that I wasn’t sure it was open, but I walked across the street to ask.  I don’t remember what time of day it was, and we weren’t even sure how hungry we were, but I couldn’t pass it up.  It was really cold outside and the inside of the restaurant smelled so good.  We were the only people there for the first little bit, and after the chef cooked our food and the server brought it to us, they sat down with their family and had their afternoon meal together nearby.  

This meal.  Ohhhhh this meal.  It was my favorite meal during our two weeks in Europe.  I had rosti, which is basically Swiss hashbrowns, with eggs and bacon and the most flavorful cheese… Mmmmm it was so good.  I don’t even remember what everyone else ate.  The whole experience was just so pleasant. So quiet and intimate and delicious.  It was the beginning of the best days of our vacation.  Switzerland we LOVE you.  

On our schedule for the last leg of our holiday was another Eurocamp, near Interlaken.  We arrived there in the afternoon and settled our things in our trailer before driving into the town to get groceries at Migros. This grocery trip went more smoothly than the last one, but only after Richard dropped me off and I realized I didn’t have my wallet, so I had to wait around for awhile until he found me again.  (Which he only happened to do because one of the kids needed to use the toilet…) 

We went back to our trailer, cooked dinner and let the kids play.  

Since that’s just about all we did this day, I’ll take this space to rave about Eurocamps. 

Our experiences at the Eurocamps were the stuff that kids’ summer vacations are made of.  Particularly in this second camp, where the kids made friends quickly.  It was so funny because some of the kids Mim and Simon played with didn’t even speak English, but they didn’t care.  Any spare minutes they had they were at the playground (which was really close to our trailer) or at the football pitch.  Cameron became buddies with a boy named Dana who was also from England.  They were inseparable whenever they could be. And in the mornings Mim would look out the window to see if the two girls in the trailer next to ours (Maggie and Kate) were out to play yet.  There were also ping-pong tables and sports equipment you could borrow from the office.  The kids played night games and begged us to stay out late.  Parents drank coffee and read books, families played card games and badminton and took evening walks.   It was so relaxed, so family-friendly, so comfortable, and so beautiful. 

It was so fun for us to watch the kids do the kinds of things we did as kids.  I didn’t know ahead of time how much they would love it, and how much we would love the way they loved it.  Visiting the cities and museums and experiencing new cultures was amazing, I hope they don’t forget those things.  But I think their most memorable times were just playing and being kids and getting dirty.