France and Switzerland, August 2022

We (well, Debbie) planned a trip to Switzerland by train for August 2020, but some kind of global health emergency cancelled those plans, so we tried again in August 2022. Part of the idea, other than adventure, was to try foreign holidays without an aeroplane. At least, one way: the trains were a faff to book, expensive, and you can't get a through-ticket all the way from home to destination, so we booked to fly back. A sort of mini-review of travel methods!

St Pancras station was chaos. We got thrown out of the queue because our train wasn't due for queueing yet, and got sent into an underground car park for pre-queueing. When we finally got into the queue proper, it contained nearly 3000 people queueing for three trains all due to leave at the same time. Funnily enough, trying to funnel all these people through the handful of passport control booths in time was doomed to fail, and the train left quite late. They've only had since 2007 to get this right... anyway, in his boredom, Matthew dropped the lid of his water bottle on the floor, licked it, and spent the next three days vomiting. The motto of this story is: don't lick station floors.

We had to pack light, as we had to carry everything around cities and train stations. This meant no big camera for me, only a phone. Apart from the lack of telephoto, it actually did a great job.

9-12th August - France

12-17th August - Switzerland

18-21st August - Switzerland