Cheese!

On our way from Montreux back to Zürich, we stopped in Gruyères ... home of the Gruyere cheese factory. I was hoping for more free samples than what we actually got (3 samples, aged 6, 8, and 10 months). I've heard that the Appenzeller cheese factory lets you sample over 100 different types of its cheeses. I'm just sayin'. But it's not like we needed to pig out on cheese because we had just eaten breakfast.

We didn't take any pictures of the cheese factory but suffice it to say that it was quite informative (we got audioguides narrated by Cherry the cow) and we got to watch the cheese-making process in action which was neat. And we got to see the cellar that was filled with rows of towering shelves filled with cheese ... which were being rotated by a robot at the time.

After we toured the Fromagerie (cheese factory) we wandered up to the little hamlet of Gruyères. It consists of one cute little street lined with shops and restaurants with a castle (Château de Gruyères) at the end of it. Gruerius, the legendary founder of Gruyères, captured a crane (in French: “grue”) and chose it as his heraldic animal inspiring the name Gruyères for the town.





The castle was built in the late 13th century and was lived in by many Counts. In the 16th century the Count who was living there fell into debt and the castle was taken over by Fribourg and the bailiffs of Fribourg lived there until the 19th century when it was sold to somebody else, then sold back to Fribourg in the 1900's when it was turned into a museum and tourist site. There is very little known about the history of this castle other than what I just wrote in this paragraph, unfortunately.

And the H.R. Giger (creator of Alien) museum is also in Gruyères, though we didn't have time to go inside it or to visit the Alien cafe right next to it:





We toured the castle and saw some more big fireplaces. I got tired of Martin always making me stand in the fireplaces for pictures so we put my dad in this one:



This was the music room:



There were some nice views from the castle but we got caught in a big thunderstorm while we were there so our pictures of the view from the castle are a bit stormy. Here's a church next to the castle:



Here's my mom, wandering around the outside of the castle:



Here we are looking down at her:



Gorgeous countryside around Gruyères (gorgeous surroundings = happy cows = delicious cheese):





Once the sun came out we took a few more countryside pics as seen from Gruyères, which is on a hill so you get a decent view:







After a nice lunch in which I was the only one to order a dish with Gruyere cheese in it, we piled back into the car and headed home to Zürich thus ending our great road trip through Germany and Switzerland (with brief drives through Austria and Italy as well).