We had the people who live on either side of us over for dinner on Friday night and part of the evening’s discussion centered on our quartier and the parking—or lack thereof—for the residents. Our street isn’t very wide so any of the legal spots that become available are highly coveted. It was during this conversation that one of our guests said with a grin, “You two are the ideal neighbors” that I was then hoping to hear words like “quiet, respectful, and orderly”. But no; the real reason that we are popular is because we don’t have a car so we don’t compete with every other house on the block. That prompted a question about how we travel both locally and long distance using only public transport which coincided perfectly with an article I had just read about visiting France car-free.

Last year while we were staying in France’s Basque country we made a day trip to the Atlantic coastal town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz and enjoyed it so much that we recently returned there to spend some more time. Having said that, in addition to revisiting many of the places we had seen on that first trip we also used it as a base for a trip into the Pyrenees mountains. We knew the name of this “other” Saint-Jean destination because walkers on the Camino pass through Carcassonne on their way there and now we were going to visit it ourselves.

It didn’t take more than a glance at a photo similar to the one across the top of today’s blog post to convince me that we had to return to Switzerland. We had been there for a week last July, mostly in Geneva, but this time we were going to be on the opposite end of the lake and beyond, enjoying spectacular views while riding luxurious trains through mountain passes and across aqueducts in the Alps. Those details I’ll save for next week while today we’ll concentrate on our 4 stopover cities that definitely have name recognition: St. Moritz, Zermatt, Interlaken, and Montreux.