Euro Day 46 - SOW Rest(ish) Day

Thursday, 8 August 2019

We've had lots of rain at night during our trip, but today was the first wet day we've had in over 6 weeks - pretty amazing! It was perfectly timed to be the rest day so we avoided getting soaked.

We didn't have a very successful tourist day though - after a delicious breakfast we headed down to Chateau D'oex to visit the Musee du Vieux Pays-d'Enhaut. This area seems to be big for intricate paper cutting type art, and the museum was billed as a museum of papercraft so I was thinking we'd be seeing old and new paper craft stuff.  Once we finally found it, it turned out it only opened at 2pm.   It was only 11am so we decided to come back to that and head to our next destination - a cheese factory in the nearby district of Gruyere - about 30 minutes away.  When we got there the huge car park was at capacity and the queue just to get a ticket for parking looked to be about 20 minutes long, so after a quick look through the doors to confirm our worst fears we decided to head to the nearby chocolate factory instead. 

Gruyere Parking and Gruyere Castle 

We should have realised this was foolish - since when would the queue at the chocolate factory be LESS than the queue at a cheese factory? When we got there we were informed that the wait for a tour was four hours long.  

So then we decided to drive back to Chateau D'oex and bring forward one of our plans for tomorrow - frisbee golf! It was just drizzling intermittently by then so it was looking good for a game.  We had to hire frisbee golf discs as we only have one frisbee between us, so we dropped by the shop which rented them and discovered that they were closed until Thursday.  Sigh. 

Thoroughly beaten,  we decided to shelter for lunch in a gazebo thing which was being set up for an outdoor concert and wait until 2pm when our very first visit failure would finally be open.

We still had a few minutes to spare after lunch, so Jon and I wandered through some nearby streets. It doesn't take long for urban to turn to rural in this country!

Finally we shuffled into the museum. And it wasn't really what I was expecting. Instead of being a collection of old and new paper craft, it was a museum of lots of generally old stuff (locks, tools, keys, furniture), setups of old rooms, and lots of very traditional paper cutting art.  It was impressive, but also a bit disappointing because I was hoping for more.   The cowbells were amazing though.

With nothing really achieved we decided to stop on our way home at the Cheese Cellar that we drive past every day.  It looked like it had a bit of a viewing place so we thought that might be good since we didn't get to the cheese factory. And it was ok, but not amazing. The only really good thing was that we avoided paying the $15 bucks entry fee per person because we accidentally wandered through an unlocked door straight into the information centre place before we discovered you had to pay. Once we realised our mistake we beat a hasty exit, but we'd already learnt a bit about the local cheeses - a small victory for us today!

Continuing home we had our other small victory, and that was discovering that the sunroof on the car actually opened! Our road to home goes along the side of this very narrow and deep gorge.  Busses meeting each other have to back up to an appropriate space before they can pass. We've noticed that we are not alone up here, there are at least two other orienteering groups staying very close by.

After a bit of a rest from our failures, we played a bit of frisbee before settling down for dinner and to get ready for tomorrow - we have a very early start and a chair lift to take us to the arena.