Mainau, die Blumeninsel

Mainau, an island we haven't even heard about a little time ago provided us with a great surprise. We can honestly say it is the most beautiful botanical (and not just) garden we've ever seen. As the name suggests, it is full of flowers. And when I say full, I means thousands of types of roses and giant dwarfs made of flowers. Along these one can see great water cascades and fountains, a palm house and last but not least a Butterfly house, something we haven't seen before and really impressed us.

OK, I guess this is already too much text about Mainau, better take a look at our pics: http://picasaweb.google.com/gulliver.gyenge/Mainau_Blumeninsel

Paris...beyond the Eiffel Tower

According to our travel guide, there are three things you need when visiting Paris: good weather, comfortable shoes and some money...well, the weather wasn't really on our side this time, yet we spent five unforgettable days in the city of love. From the Louvre to the Arc de Triomph and from the Notre Dame to the Eiffel Tower, we visited all the touristic places in the city (there are quite a lot in Paris).
How is really Paris? Describing it in a few words only, Paris is huge, it's full of history and art and many-many tourists and immigrants from all over the world...

EUROPE - FRANCE - Paris

We also spent one day in Versailles, visiting the famous castle and its huge park - as you can see on many of the photos, the castle is full of precious art work (there is even a chapel and an opera house inside) and more then one thousand fountains are spread around the park, bursting into a two-hour musical water show every weekend day.

EUROPE - FRANCE - Versailles

Bye Bye ALF, welcome VUK

As we allready wrote, at Easter we had to say bye bye to ALF, our Laguna:




But we welcome VUK, our new Megane (2.0 16V Priviledge):

Weekend getaway to the French Riviera

This last trip was a great surprise from my wife. On my birthday all the information I had, is to pack my luggage since we are travelling to warmer places. I only found out where we are going on the airport, at the check in counter where it was already inevitable.

Thursday evening we landed in Nice, a very beautiful resort on the French Riviera.We have spent here the entire Friday and Sunday till noon. The weather was very warm, but unfortunately the water was still quite cold to swim.


















On Saturday we visited the glamorous Principality of Monaco. We arrived there in the middle of their preparations for the F1 Grand Prix. It is amazing that they manage to build the entire infrastructure of a racing circuit within a few weeks. We visited in turn the Marina region, the Monaco Ville with the Prince's Palace, and the Museum of Oceanography. After that we walked along most of the GP circuit with a detour at the Japanese Gardens, all the way to Monte-Carlo with its famous Casino and Cafe& Hotel Paris.


















On Sunday we spent a few more hours on the beach, after an unsuccessful attempt to go to Eze (a marathon in Nice proved to stop all buses in and around Nice, whose public transportation we found to be a total disaster thus we almost missed our flight).
In early afternoon we returned to Switzerland where we were glad to see that at least here all public transportation is reliable.




More pics:
Nice
Monaco