Switzerland Part 4: Around Lake Geneva

—guest post by Owen

This is the last post in our series on our recent trip to Switzerland; here are part 1 (Geneva), part 2 (Lausanne), and part 3 (Gruyères and Le Moléson), but you don't have to read them first.  On the day after we ascended Le Moléson with our friends Chris and Yordan, they found a great deal on a rental car and we made a road trip around Lake Geneva past vineyards and castles, into France, and back through Geneva to Lausanne.

Just minutes outside of Lausanne, the view became this:

The Lavaux Vineyard Terraces are a Unesco world heritage site.

Chris and Yordan had to laugh as Clara and I began to repeat "It's so beautiful..." every few minutes, which we kept up for the rest of the trip.

Between cities, the road became quite narrow.

And even in the small towns, it stayed narrow and just got more twisty!  Up and down, left and right—we were so glad Chris was driving.

Who could drive onto that little ledge?  Fortunately we went off to the right.

We stopped to get out in Vevey, where there was an inter-city boating event and an associated fair on the waterfront.

Chris, Yordan, and Clara set off to sample the food.  Chocolate chip waffles, anyone? Yum.

We strolled along the waterfront enjoying the scenery.  The view over the water showed the next leg of our journey: around the tip of Lake Geneva and crossing into France.

Apparently these rocks have holes drilled in them so that in the warmer months there can be chairs.

The border crossing was totally uneventful, and we stopped in a park in Évian to eat our picnic lunch and look back across the water at Lausanne and Vevey:

Évian is the source of the eponymous bottled water.

From there, we continued to Yvoire, a little old town on a pointy peninsula.  We were expecting something like this:

What we were surprised to find, was this:

Apparently Yvoire was having its own festival that day: people were in costume head-to-toe everywhere you looked, and you could buy your own carnival-style mask as you entered, if you wanted to join in.  The town was even quainter than we'd expected though, with flowers and old stone walls defining a maze of pedestrian-only streets:

From there, the rest of the road trip passed quickly.  We rounded the other end of Lake Geneva by passing through Geneva itself:

We'd just been there!

It was strange to whiz through a city we'd spent hours in a few days before and would be taking the train back to a couple days later.  But onward we went, and returned safe and sound to Chris and Yordan's apartment in Lausanne.

It probably looks like this every evening.

Thanks for reading this series on Switzerland!  Been on any fun road trips yourselves recently? Anywhere we must go or anything we must see next?  Tell us in the comments!