We said goodbye to Provence on Friday – after spending much too short of a time perusing Lourmarin’s Friday market – and spent another long day on the road, driving to the Swiss Alps. We’re staying with Josh’s step-father’s aunt at her chalet in the mountaintop village of Gspon. The village can only be reached by two-hour hike or a tiny cable car! It’s an absolutely amazing place – people have been living up here for hundreds of years, tending their cattle and sheep as they graze for the summer, but it’s still very isolated (thankfully, they do now have Internet…). We’ve been lucky with the weather, blue skies and warm temperatures for the past two days. The area here is indescribably beautiful. Hopefully our photos will do some justice to what we’ve seen. We set a record yesterday, filling an entire 8 GB memory card with photos in only 5 hours- on a hike up and across the mountain, following the ‘waterways’ that provide the mountaintop villages and grazing fields with fresh glacier water. We passed a very remote grazing field where a farmer was tending his cows, all of which have big bells around their necks so they can be found when the inevitable thick fog sets in – what a sound! Today we hiked 6 hours in the other direction, ending above the treeline on a peak overlooking an Alpine lake with views of the Matterhorn. We’ve got rain in the forecast for the next two days, but it might be just as well – I think we’re both pretty overloaded with what we’ve seen over the past few days!

A lot of photos this time!