Day Ten

Liechtenstein and Austria

We left Champéry at 7 and got to Liechtenstein around noonish. It was sad to leave Champéry, since it had made such a good impression. Until that point, Switzerland had been near the top of my places-I-want-to-visit list; now I had been there. It was hard for any place to follow that, but they did admirably. (For the next four years, Canada moved to the top of the list.)

Liechtenstein is one of those small countries, like Andorra, Luxembourg, Monaco, San Marino, and Vatican City. Liechtenstein is 62 square miles. The capital city is Vaduz, which is where we stopped. The country has a royal family who is apparently pretty popular, or at least was when we were there.
Since we were only there for about an hour, and since we would have had to try really hard to make or find trouble, we were allowed to wander off by ourselves. We must have been allowed to, because I did. The most famous landmark in Vaduz is the castle, which is up on a hill. That's not a great picture of the castle, but there it is. The royal family owns vineyards; I was a little surprised to see any vineyards at all there. It didn't strike me as especially good grape-growing weather, but what do I know about horticulture. I also saw a nice church. I'd started off walking along a road, not knowing at all where it went, and after a while I decided I'd better turn around before I walked straight out of the country. Of course I couldn't have actually walked all the way out of Liechtenstein, but I didn't know that at the time.

From Liechtenstein we continued on to Austria. We got to Seefeld around 4 and got settled into the Hotel Marthe. The hotel was about seven minutes' walk and up a slight hill from the center of town, so once we were checked in some of us walked down. I exchanged some money, everyone else bought ice cream, and we went back to the hotel for dinner. We watched part of a movie in French on TV, which was a little inexplicable, and then to bed.

Tomorrow: Innsbruck, and the second-most memorable concert of the trip