Up reasonably early for a lovely hot buffet breakfast and good coffee. After packing up and loading onto the bus, we headed south from Zurich towards Lucerne where we bypassed the city but headed for the cable car that took us to the top of Mount Stanserhorn. What a view! And on all four sides!



I climbed up a path towards the actual summit of the mountain, but got distracted by the caged area which housed a family of Alpine marmot - this animal lives in the central and western alps in family groups, preferring sunny slopes where they build burrows.



Then onto Legano the Italian speaking part of Zurich very near the Italian border where we had lunch. It is hot again today! Yuk! Pasta for lunch and my first experience with not being able to read many words on the menu (and no one to ask for a full translation) and selecting based on the fact it was pasta and not much else! Turned out alright tho’.

Legano is the Victor Harbour of Switzerland where people retire to and is situated on a very nice lake. Sadly, because tourists visit here often, prices for anything and everything are extremely high - for example, a Burger King (Hungry Jacks) Whopper Meal costs €10,90 here, that's $18.50 in Australian currency, without even "going large". Three times the price of the equivalent meal back home in Australia. Yay. Go team. You gouge us, we'll boycot you.



From here it is into Italy in the motorway, a left turn somewhere in the vicinity of Milan and across the country to Venice. Once out of the alps there isn’t a lot to see when you are on a motorway. They put lots of walls and trees in your way. We did see a couple of nice villas once we got closer to Venice though.



Dinner was in our hotel this evening – probably because the hotel is nowhere near anything civilised. If I have one criticism of our Trafalgar tour it was these meals in Venice. We are in Italy and everyone tells us that the Italians can cook. Well the one at this hotel needs lessons. The food was boring, bland and hopefully atypical of the food we get when we travel through Italy before heading home. Trafalgar can definitely find somewhere better to stay than this place – the rooms aren’t great and the food is shocking!