Lugano e Como

We had a three day weekend in May and so we decided to go a little south to Ticino, which is the southern Italian-bordering, Italian-speaking, region of Switzerland. However, we got a hotel recommendation from a fellow expat and it turns out that our hotel is actually in Italy, just over the border. Lake Lugano is partly in each country and really, who can pass up any chance to go to Italy?

View of Lake Lugano from our hotel balcony.

As the date got nearer, we amassed quite a group of us headed to the Parco San Marco resort. In the end, five American families - all expat friends - made the trek together. We had five couples and between us, seventeen children. That's right! Seventeen. Someone later said to me, "Boy, I'll bet that hotel was happy to see you come . . . and happy to see you leave." Amen!

The resort was beautiful. There were several buildings of rooms (including family rooms: ours was a 2 bedroom, 1 bath, with a full kitchen), three restaurants, three pools (including the kids' "Fun Pool" with water slides), a spa, and a Kids' Club with many kids' activities throughout the day (archery was the boys' favorite).

The kids playing in Bellinzona

We headed to Lugano right after school on Friday, stopping in Bellinzona for dinner. We made our way around Lake Lugano just as it was getting dark, on tiny winding roads with one-lane bridges and tunnels that only made me grip the steering wheel in terror for 90% of the journey.

Patrick, Sam, Grant, and Alex having fun at the aptly named Fun Pool.

On Saturday we spent most of the day at the hotel pools and beach. Since all five of our families are good friends, our kids have played a lot together in the last year, so it was fun having so many playmates on holiday with us. The kids loved the Fun Pool and the parents loved that there was a restaurant at the pool, to order lunch and keep it simple. We spent the afternoon at the beach, complete with trampolines and sandboxes. Some of the wives slipped away to enjoy spa services!

Charlie and his best buddy Natalie enjoyed the pool.

Grant loved riding his scooter on the resort's skate park.

The Kids Club was great and very instrumental in really making this feel like a vacation. For those of us with kids, there is a healthy difference between taking a trip with your kids and vacationing with your kids. Vacationing with kids requires little breaks from the kids. Hello Kids Club! The kids were promptly dropped off at the kids club at 5:30 in the evening where they enjoyed the bounce house, foos-ball, Wii Dance Party, etc. and a buffet dinner, with a movie shown afterward. The five couples were able to have two group dinners at the two resort restaurants, and that made it feel like a real treat!

Tobi climbed up to the top.

On Sunday Tobi got up and out early and did an extraordinary hike by himself to the top of the mountain behind the hotel. On his five hour (!!!) hike, he encountered several deer, an old abandoned church, something that may or may not have been part of the wild cat family, and a geocache at the tippy-tippy top that hadn't been found in over a year (he's very proud of this fact). I, on the other hand, did another kind of geocaching called Ladies Shopping Trip in Como. As soon as he got back from his hike, I promptly handed over responsibility for three kids to him and took off with the ladies for an afternoon. 

Lake Como, with Bellagio in the distance.

Laura, Me, Beth, and Annalisa (and baby Tagg!) on the ferry to Bellagio.

The town was very pretty and charming.

We drove about thirty minutes to the town of Griante, on Lake Como, and took the ferry across the lake to the touristy town of Bellagio. Bellagio was a cute little town with steep little narrow walking streets with cute shops and restaurants. We shopped a bit and had a nice lunch and shopped some more (jewelry, Limoncello, and ties for the husbands, Oh my!). We took the ferry back across the lake and drove back in time for me to partake in the hotel spa with a massage before dinner.

The kids at Swissminiatur with a miniature Matterhorn behind them.

Our own little Swiss Miss

We had to go back to Zurich on Monday, so after breakfast we decided to stop in Lugano at a little park called Swissminiatur. It's basically a tiny model Switzerland that you can walk through. It wasn't a huge attraction, but the children enjoyed it and they especially enjoyed pointing out the places we had been. After a lunch in Lugano with an amazing view of the lake, we headed back home.

For some reason, there was also a miniature Duomo di Milano at the park,
which is odd because it's not Swiss. But it was so large, the kids could fit inside it so I took their picture.
We saw the real Duomo in our first two weeks of living in Europe.

Our last lunch in Lugano was the perfect ending.

On that Friday night when we first got to Bellinzona and found a trattoria for dinner, I had a moment of sheer happiness that brought tears to my eyes. There is nothing that feels the way the beginning of a vacation feels, is there? Everyone was excited to be off for a few days. We were all hungry and happy to have found a nice place for dinner. We were sitting outside with a fountain nearby. The waiter had just brought us our wine, which never hurts! We were ordering our dinners in a mix of German-English-Italian that made everyone giggly. And I just had this moment of pure gratitude. Grateful for this experience, for our children. For our memories. People often say to me, "It's too bad your kids are so young; they probably won't remember much of this." Perhaps that is true. Especially for Caroline. But I will remember it and I will tell them stories. Stories like how Grant knows how to order pizza mit scharf salame und ananas, ohne sauce in German. Stories like how Charlie, our little six year old from Chicago, Illinois, has just about the funniest and best German accent of any expat I've heard. Stories like how Caroline just insisted to me last week that we're from Switzerland, not America. There are moments like these that pass us by so quickly, we often forget to ponder them. Sitting in that piazza in Bellinzona, watching my kids play around the fountain with the mountains of Ticino surrounding us, I felt it. We are very lucky, indeed.

Ciao!

Tiffany

Up next: France

The Black Forest

Last month we had two long weekends in a row (Ascension and Whit Monday) and we can't let a long weekend go by without discovering a new place! Unfortunately, Tobi was traveling to the U.S. that week, so I knew we wouldn't be able to take a flight or a long road trip. We decided to explore Germany's Black Forest, a mere 2-3 hours north of Zurich. 


We picked Tobi up at the Zurich airport on Thursday morning, where he'd just landed on a flight from Chicago, and headed north. Our first stop was the oldest silver mine in Germany, the Schauinsland silver mine and caves. I had meant for us to park at the bottom of the mountain and take the gondola up to the top to the silver mine. But my navigation skills being not so great, we ended up climbing the mountain in the Volvo and parking right next to the mine. The boys were happy because we parked right in a parking lot with snow all around us. Snow in May was a fun treat and an impromptu snowball fight ensued.

Snow in May on top of the mountain!

We had lunch at the little restaurant near the gondola and I tasted my first Black Forest cake. That's right - I'd never felt the urge to try Black Forest Cake, but when in Rome . . . anyway, I think I could have been drunk off that cake if Tobi had not shared it with me. Wow - have some cake with your booze.

After lunch we toured the mine. We had to don hard hats (and yes, I was freaked out by the idea of sharing helmets with other tourists) to enter the mine. The boys enjoyed that and being in the cave, but the tour itself was a bust as it was entirely in German. I pretended to understand the tour guide and laugh in the appropriate places.

Hi ho Hi ho, It's off to work they go.

After the tour, we headed further north to a teeny village (seriously, 10 houses and a lumber yard and our hotel) in the Black Forest, called Freiamt. We stayed at a very lovely hotel, the Hotel Ludinmühle. We did what the Europeans term the "half board" option, which means we opted for breakfast and dinner in the hotel. Which was obviously the smart thing to do since there wasn't another village around for miles and miles. We spent the afternoon of the first day at the hotel pools. The hotel had a beautiful indoor and outdoor pools, which were heated. That was perfect because the temperatures were mild, if a bit chilly. The food at this hotel was spectacular, especially the breakfasts. Grant and Charlie have decided European hotels have the best breakfasts - I think they will remember the breakfasts the most.

On Friday we drove about twenty minutes from our hotel to the ruins of Hochburg Castle, a thousand-year-old castle in the Upper Rhine Valley. Ruins are probably a favorite of our kids. It's a good place for them to run around without me worrying that they're going to destroy anything, like in a maintained castle with furnishings! The boys inevitably play knights and invent battles with pretend swords (or sticks). This particular castle was pretty much deserted. We parked at the bottom of a hill near a farm and walked up at our own pace, the kids running ahead and pretending to keep watch of the enemy.

The kids loved the ruins at Hochburg Castle.

We spent a couple of hours at the castle and then we headed a little further north to spend the afternoon at the Black Forest Open Air Museum, also known as the Vogtsbauernhof. The museum had houses of buildings from various eras throughout history, with the oldest house being a farmhouse from 1612. There were cows, horses, sheep, and goats. The children especially loved the "natural" playground with the polished rock-slide. We enjoyed ice cream and bought cuckoo-clock whistles from a shop that carves them there. From there we headed back to our hotel for some pool time before dinner.

House from 1612; kids from 2002.

Caroline loved the cows!

The polished rock slide was super fast - Daddy was needed!

Each kid picked their cuckoo clock whistle.

On Saturday morning, Grant woke up with what we're pretty sure was food poisoning. We're not sure what he ate that made him sick (Grant tries the interesting items on a buffet that the rest of us wouldn't dare) but he was sick for about 8 hours. Tobi took Charlie out and they went hiking and geocaching in the forest, while Grant, Caroline, and I stayed in the hotel watching Brady Bunch episodes on the laptop. By afternoon Grant was feeling much better and we all went out for lunch at a little restaurant in the middle of the forest with the best goulash I've ever tasted. We again spent the late afternoon in the pool.

The pool was their favorite part!

On Sunday we got up and had our last amazing breakfast at the hotel before heading back to Switzerland. Our journey took us through Schaffhausen, which is home to the Rhine Falls, Europe's largest waterfall. We stopped there and took not one, but two, boat tours. Tobi decided we hadn't had enough adventure that weekend so he got us the regular boat tour and then the "adventure" boat tour that takes you to the rock in the middle of the falls. It lets you off, where you climb a very tiny and very steep staircase crowded with other people, to the top, so you can feel like you're in the falls. Let's just say it took a while for my legs not to feel like jelly (I'm a scaredy-cat!).

The Rhine Falls. See those people up on that rock? Yeah. We did that.

The boys at the Rhine Falls

Three best lil travelers we could hope for!

We left the falls and headed home after a nice long weekend away. Germany is a large country, and I'm pretty sure each region has a lot more to offer than we'll ever see. I'm glad we got to see beauty of the Black Forest.

Cheers!

Tiffany

Up next: Italy