Friday, July 3
The next day, our last in Montreux, the weather looked perfect, so we decided to head over to Chillon. I had attempted to research ahead of time to find a place on the way where we could both eat breakfast and grab some sandwiches for take out for a picnic lunch after the castle. ChatGPT had recommended the Tea Room de la Baye, so we headed off to find that. It was not on the way. It was uphill in a different part of town, which was a lovely part of town, and I’m glad we saw it, but it was not on the way. We finally found the tea room and ordered breakfast, which was delicious. However, there were no sandwiches to be found, and when I asked (“Avez-vous des sandwiches pour emporter?” which probably wasn’t exactly correct, but at least it was in French. It took me three days, but I finally remembered some French!), she said she only had pastries. So, while we did enjoy our meal here, it both wasn’t on the way and didn’t have sandwiches, so don’t listen to ChatGPT.
We finally made our way back down to the lakeside promenade and enjoyed our walk the rest of the way to the castle. No surprise, but the Swiss Travel Pass also got us free entry here. They handed LS a kids guide, where we were supposed to find a dragon or follow some clues in certain rooms, so that really got her engaged in the tour. The castle was massive! And it had a dungeon! And secret passages! One could not ask for a better castle to explore.
After we were done exploring all the rooms, LS went to the gift shop and chose a little dragon on a keychain that she named Swiss. Then we went over to the nearby self-serve restaurant and had sandwiches there, and, honestly, it wasn’t extremely overpriced, so we probably came out about the same if we had purchased sandwiches from a bakery.
We then headed across the street to Fort de Chillon, which I hadn’t even told Mr. Strange and LS about other than we were going to a “fort”. It’s actually an old WWII bunker that was declassified only six years earlier and opened as a tourist attraction. Mr. Strange loved going through this and it had a lot of interactivity to keep LS entertained. They also had a special activity for kids, where we had to look for a hedgehog throughout the bunker and count how many we found. And, if she found them all, she would get a prize at the gift shop. She did end up finding them all and received some candy.
Our legs were pretty tired at this point, so we took the bus back into town. We dropped our things off at the hotel and found a new box on the table, in addition to the sunglasses from the day before: a chocolate turntable. This was obviously a gift in relation to the jazz festival and the sunglasses box was still sitting there next to them, so we reasoned that they were both promotional gifts from the hotel. We then headed out to check out the first night of the jazz festival, which was just getting started. We bought some souvenirs at the merch tent, and LS and I shared a pizza and got ice cream. Most of the music was starting later, so the two of us went back to the hotel to get ready for bed while Mr. Strange went to check out some of the stages.
