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Solar Tour 2008 – Day 9: Soon after Trigance, we reached the Verdon Gorge, the world’s second largest gorge with a length of 25 kilometers and up to 700 meters deep. We’ve visited this impressive canyon a couple of time before but each time it is worth the visit. It is just breathtaking to see the ravine, which the turquoise-green Verdon river has cut through the limestone.

The Verdon river flows into the artificial Sainte-Croix lake, which was our final destination for the day. In les Salles-sur-Verdon we wanted to stay on a campground were Chris and I have been many years before on one of our first trips.

Solar Tour 2008 – Day 6: In the afternoon we wanted to visit CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research close to Geneva. Not only is it the birthplace of the world-wide-web as we know it but also home of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator complex. It was surprisingly difficult to find CERN on the border between Switzerland and France. Unfortunately the visitor center was closed. We don’t know exactly why. Maybe because of the LHC experiments or there might have been a national holiday (all stores seemed to be closed as well).
There was a campground nearby but we didn’t like it and didn’t want to loose an extra day waiting for CERN to open again, so we left Switzerland and tried to find a campground or motorhome parking in France. The first campground we tried was already closed when we arrived at 17:15 and we didn’t see anyone to let us in. That’s one reason why many motorhome people don’t really like campgrounds. We often arrive later in the evening and just need a place for the night. Some kilometers further on in Saint-Disdille close to Thonon-les-Bains we were more lucky and got a good place. It was a long day, which didn’t quiet go as expected, so being able to rest, have a nice dinner and take a shower felt good.

Solar Tour 2008 – Day 6: Just when we had seen Romainmôtier the first rain drops came down, so we continued our trip. We first considered to visit Lausanne and stay there for the night but were not impressed by its motor home parking. In general we don’t really enjoy larger and busy cities and rather prefer to find something quiet in a nice area. So we continued driving along the Lac Leman (lake Geneva) and when a street sign pointing to Saint-Prex as medieval village, we decided to give it a try and it was absolutely worth it. Saint-Prex has preserved its architectural heritage very well and it hasn’t been ruined by tourism yet.

Solar Tour 2008 – Day 6: Before leaving Switzerland soon again on our way to France of course we also wanted to see something. In our tourist guide we had read about Romainmôtier, a small characteristic medieval village in the mountains. Thanks to the route of our navigation system we passed through the beautiful valley of the Orbe river and took some pictures in Les Clées. The Orbe valley is definitely a place we want to visit again in the future.
A bit later we arrived in Romainmôtier and were welcomed by some Swiss cows. The village itself offers a 10th century Romanesque abbey church, which is one of the earliest monastery settlements in Switzerland.

Solar Tour 2008 – Day 5: In the afternoon we entered Switzerland. With the motor home this was our first time. We were not really prepared for Switzerland and beforehand only had planned to visit CERN in Geneva. So we got some tourist guides at a gas station and paid for our freeway vignette. In Saint-Aubin-Sauges we found a nice motor home parking at the harbor, directly along the shore of the lake Neuchâtel. It was still warm enough to have dinner outside under a chestnut tree and we had the opportunity to take a hot shower. In the evening we were able to watch the weather report on Swiss TV and based on that it didn’t look too good for us. Only the next day was supposed to be good and after that a lot of rain was being announced for Switzerland. So it looked like it would be better to move further south towards France and the Provence faster than we had planned.