Even though the site was lovely, we decided to move on to Switzerland, but only after the lovely lady in reception had given me a guided tour of the site’s trees and flowering shrubs.
She was very keen to show me a “tulip tree” – a large tree of mature size, covered in flowers that looked just like greeny yellow tulips. Her English didn’t extend to telling me exactly what it was and my French couldn’t get past the “tulipier de virginie” but it was still spectacular.

 

 We set off for the Swiss border at Basel, and an hour later were paying for our vignettes, a pass to allow us to travel on the motorways. We had to have one for the caravan too, so £54 later we were on our way. We have never towed in Switzerland before, but as with most things, the Swiss are very efficient with their road system. The scenery was great when we actually saw it - the thing that surprised us most was the amount of tunnels we went through; most of Basel was traversed underground plus at least 50% of the rest of the route.
 


 
 We passed Lucerne then headed towards Interlaken and our intended base at Meiringen. This is where Sherlock Holmes met his fate fighting with Moriarty at a waterfall, and the small town not only has statues of him but a walking route of associated things plus a museum all about him!


 Our site was Alpencamping, 2km out of town in the flat valley of the River Aare but surrounded by mountains with snowy tops. The site is very nice, 80 grass pitches with half being permanently-sited vans; it has spotless facilities (the Ladies has gentle music playing and paper butterfly stencils on the walls)plus electrics and water at each pitch and for the first time we didn’t need to use levelling blocks.


  The one drawback was that the Fohn wind was blowing very strongly, making it difficult to even open the door, but Frau assured us it would stop that night, and so it proved. Needless to say, the awning didn’t go up.


 It was lovely sitting in the van looking at sunshine on the mountains in every direction whilst sipping wine and being buffeted by gusts of wind. The site seems to have a resident kite, which constantly flies overhead and has the loudest whistling cry I’ve ever heard a kite do. We didn’t fancy bbq-ing in the gale, so tea was a vegetable & bacon stirfry.


 Hubby was happy that the wifi here was quite efficient and allowed the use of multiple devices, but less than amused that the satellite just would NOT find a signal so we could watch something in English. Back to the drawing board...then the rain started. We looked at several weather forecasts for tomorrow which all agreed it would rain steadily during the morning with showers in the afternoon, so I spent the evening researching Things To Do In The Interlaken Area In The Rain in anticipation.