I know you want to know, so I’ll tell you. We survived the dreaded double bed! As usual we took the quilt off the bed, but at around 3 o’clock this morning it was freezing in our room and I went looking for it only to find that Annemarie had already gotten up and put it on her side of the bed so as not to disturb me. I quickly rectified that and crawl back into bed to try and get a few more hours of sleep. We are up over 1000m here and the nights do cool off. Besides, we left the window wide open!
Up this morning raring to go knowing that we had a pretty special day ahead of us. We went down for breakfast and found Paul also having breakfast. At 27 he was quite content to sleep in his sleeping bag outside undercover somewhere nearby. Nice to be young! He’s quite an interesting young man and we had the opportunity to chat late today as we walked into Orbe with him.
One of the best parts of the day it was wake up to find the sky crisp and blue!
So we set off with a fairly steep descent, and it was wonderful to be able to see into the distance again. This is looking back towards Jornge.
After seeing some great scenery we eventually reached the French - Swiss frontier will be paused for a couple of photos. It’s kind of fun to be into our third country now as we approach three weeks. The first photo is me being sad to leave France.
Second photo is delight to finally be in Switzerland again!
The only real change we noticed as we walked into Switzerland was a different flag. Well and this too.
As we walked on to a small town Annemarie had identified as a possible stop for a rest and our morning refreshment, we passed by a small grocery store and decided that we could stop there. It was unexpected to find a store opened on a Sunday. There was a nice looking bench outside to sit on so we went inside and found our various bits and pieces of food and drink. As we were checking out we started chatting with the owner of the store. He told us that he had lived in Seattle for a number of years with his now ex-wife, but had returned to Switzerland to take over his family business. His then wife tried to make the move, but missed Seattle and that was sadly the end of that. He pointed out there were no children involved. We went outside to enjoy our morning refreshment and Jean Luc came out behind us to present us with a lovely Swiss dark chocolate and hazel nut bar, and the offer of the use of his toilet should we require. It was a true act of osseti as is often experienced when walking the Shikoku in Japan.
As we were readying to leave our Dutch friends showed up and after a brief visit we set off.
Today was all about descending out of the Jural Mountains by way of the Gorge D’Orbe.
The gorge is very deep and it took quite a while to get down to the base of it. We then walked for about 15 km through the gorge, up and down, across the river multiple times and across some rather precarious trails. The views and in some places, the drops to the bottom of the gorge are quite stunning and in occasionally a little disturbing. I know my photographs won’t really capture all this, but believe me, it’s all there.
It’s also incredibly beautiful. Building parts of this trail must’ve been quite the process. There were tunnels cut through the limestone in many locations.
We found a nice little place for lunch right down by the river. This gave us an opportunity to take a break in a cool shaded area. We picked up some fruit and cheese at the grocery store and with a little chocolate it was a nice snack along the way.
Then on we trekked. It must’ve taken us at least four hours to walk the gorge. However, we enjoyed the entire experience. A couple of the small bridges were a little bit hairy if you’re in anyway height impacted.
Believe me, there was absolutely nothing to be seen from this bench!
We finally climbed out of the gorge. We knew this was going to eventually happened and it was a long steep climb out. When we came out though we were a little surprised to see often to distance the alps. It was a pretty exciting moment actually. We will be entering those mountains in about 3 days!
We will cross those rolling hills tomorrow, direction Lausanne and Lake Geneva.
And then we were in to this pretty little town where we are presently enjoying a very expensive beer. It’s Switzerland. Very, very expensive! I can hear the coins dripping out of our bank account as we just ordered dinner😵💫 Our little hotel on the right.
Quiet Sunday centre.
Home for tonight.
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