This Month: From Paris to Lauterbrunnen

(I realize it is already mid October, but better late than never!)

During the month of September, I went on a 2 week vacation through France and Switzerland.

My trip started in Paris, with what was the original reason for traveling: meeting some of my co-workers and attending the Kernel Recipes conference. I had a great time meeting all of them, I got to try escargot for the first time in their company, and we went to an interesting escape room game that had social deduction elements.

Then for the next three days I attended Kernel Recipes. It was my first time at this event, and combination of the single presentation track format, the live sketches of speakers and people from the audience, and the auction to gather donations for a FOSS project (this time, the Software Freedom Conservancy) made this a very special event for me. I hope to be back for future editions!

But the real fun started next, as I went on a road trip with my dad, from Paris in France all the way to Lauterbrunnen in Switzerland and back. We stopped at the following places:

• Paris
• Senlis
• Versailles
• Fontainebleau
• Auxerre
• Noyers
• Abbaye de Fontenay
• Dole
• Arbois
• Estavayer-le-lac
• Bern
• Luzern
• Lauterbrunnen
• Montbeliard
• Langres
• Provins

Here they are on the map:

We really did a lot in that one and a half week. We explored the catacombs in Paris, visited many medieval towns and drove through many more, went inside more churches than I can remember and rode cable cars back and forth through the Swiss alps just to make the most of our expensive daily passes.

It made me happy to see my dad eagerly making use of his French that he had been practicing on Duolingo for a couple years now. And I'll cherish the memory of the little memes that took form during the trip: like when my dad told me that whenever his uncle would get lost driving he would say "we're wandering", and from then on so too this became our motto whenever we took a wrong turn. After all, we really were wandering.

Here are some of my favorite photos from the trip:

During most of our time driving, we used the car radio to tune to local stations to try to get a taste of the local music. There was one song that played at least 4 times while we were there, so it quite naturally became this trip's theme for me: Tove Lo x Stromae - des fleurs