Today is Bev's 74th birthday and it started with the lovely lady in the breakfast room giving Bev a beautiful long stemmed red rose and wishing her a "Joyeux Anniversaire".

How sweet of them, and yes, Bev did get a little teary .

After a long, relaxing breakfast we decided to drive to Lausanne today for a look around. Our friend Colin had raved about Lausanne so we thought it would be nice to visit it on Bev's birthday.

Found our way to Lausanne easily and parked in a garage near the lake.  An odd thing - a lot of the parking garages we've been in have piped music.  I'm used to that in shopping malls but not in car parks!

Anyway, we walked along near the lake on the promenade for a while looking at the beautiful water, white swans and gardens.  Saw an ingenious invention - paddle boats for hire with an inbuilt slide, so you can paddle out into the lake, and then slide into the water just like you have your own miniature water amusement park with you!
 
Had fun looking at all the beautiful roses in a garden near the Chateau d'Ouchy, which in itself is a grand and impressive building.  I actually considered staying here when I was booking hotels, but I decided I rather liked my kidneys so we stayed elsewhere (it's rather expensive!!)

Enjoyed our first crepes this trip at a Creperie with a view of the lake despite my appalling dearth of French vocabulary.  Ok, so I misheard the waiter and he had a smirk at me, but we got there and the citron & sucre crepes were tres bien!. Nom nom nom (french for yum)

After our snack we decided to head up to the "old town" section of Lausanne .  We're still not smart enough to not walk around in the heat of the day (thought Switzerland was the land of cold and snow!!) but at least today we had enough nous to take the funicular style Metro train to the top of the hill and walk down rather than up for a change!

Having said that, naturally we still managed to ferret out plenty of stairs and steep roads to walk up once we got to the old town!  First we visited the Gothic Cathedral high on the hill with a wonderful view over Lausanne. As with nearly all buildings in Europe, this one was very old - construction began in 1150 and it wasn't completed until around 1275.  That's 125 years of construction!  Can you imagine any politician these days green-lighting a building that won't be finished during their political career let alone their lifetime?  No, neither can I.

We spent a few hours meandering around the old town, looking at markets in the squares, drooling over luscious cakes and just generally wandering around with no set agenda .
 
Back at the lake we treated Bev to a flash lunch for her birthday, a toasted mozzarella & tomato panini eaten while sitting on the grass. Haha.  Actually she wasn't very hungry so we decided on just a snack and to save ourselves for dinner tonight.

Continued driving around the lake and randomly stopped at Bourg - a tiny village right on the shore. Such an extremely sweet, sleepy little place with cobbled streets and lots of colourful flowers spilling from both window boxes and doorstep pot plants.

Wandered around the streets here taking photos and then down to the "beach" (i.e. stones going down to the water) to have a quick paddle. While cooling our feet we saw a Mumma swan with 4 cygnets floating towards us. Awww how cute. Then not cute! Attack of the killer swan - she chased us and everyone else out of the water. Deceptive trained killers.

Continued on to the town of Nyon, a pretty little place with lots of history dating back to Roman times and where we accidentally drove the hire car through a pedestrian only square . Whoops. Blame the damn GPS!

Had a wonderful alfresco dinner at a lovely Italian restaurant in a square over looking the Nyon castle tonight. A nice place for Bev's Birthday dinner and perhaps the best meal I've had all trip. Lovely fresh salad with a scrumptious dressing to start followed by ricotta cannelloni with tomato Ragu. Bellissimo! Of course there was an Aperol Spritz to be enjoyed as well.  :)

Just as we finished dinner a big thunderstorm rolled in, blowing menus and place mats away and threatening to blow table umbrellas away too. Apart from getting a little wet from the rain, our walk back down the hill was quite refreshing though after a hot sticky day walking around in 34C!

Bev treated us to gelato at the base of the hill (delicious!) and then we took the faster motorway home to Montreux, with the storm chasing us all the way with brilliant flashes of lighting and a vivid sunset on our rear horizon .

Back at the hotel the worn out Birthday girl (well she is a year older now... ) went off to bed while Jeff and I watched the storm from our balcony.

Some really huge flashes of both sheet and fork lightening all across the lake and directly above us. Awesome to see. 

Incidentally, we saw a different type of flash when the balcony door for the room next to us opened and a naked lady walked out! I should point out it's a shared balcony which is also very visible from the street. Walking out starkers is probably not the brightest thing to do! She must be German. They don't seem to care where they get their kit off and who is there to see it.

I wisely went to bed after this while Jeff decided to walk down to the lake in a thunderstorm to try and get some photos of lightening. Hmm yes guess who got soaked 5mins after leaving the room when it bucketed down!