We went to an Alpine Coaster for Kate’s birthday. We had gorgeous weather and had a lot of fun riding the Rodelbahn!
Pics from our trip to Lugano, Switzerland. We went to Swiss Miniature the first day and then went to a park for Mateo to play after the long car ride.
Sunday, we went up the funicular to the top of San Salvatore and then we hiked down. The hike was a little more than we expected but Mateo was a real trooper and finished with energy to spare. After we took the Lugano city tour on a train looking vehicle that Mateo thought was really cool and then we had dinner followed by Gelati and a rain storm.
We spent Monday at the Botanical garden and had a wonderful Italian lunch which Mateo didn’t eat anything other than an apple because he’s more picky than Kate! Then we went back into Lugano, had some more Gelati and rented a boat. All was going great until the propeller stopped working and we were stuck with no phone number to the rental place. Someone on shore noticed something wasn’t right for us and called the Marina police and Jose go tthe number to information from a co-worker and then proceeded to call the rental place. Of course, they tried to tell us we did something wrong but of course we did not! Jose had to use the oar in the boat to keep us from crashing in to the side rock wall and then the Police came (which Mateo thought was the absolute coolest!) and the rental boat people and they towed us back to shore. They told us to get out of the boat before we sank it (yes, they were beyond rude but customer service isn’t very big here). We had a good laugh about it and then we took a detour through Italy around Lake Maggiore, a car ferry ride and back into Switzerland to home.
Today we went up to Mount Pilatus in the Swiss Alps. It is not one of the tallest, but the views from the top are quite spectacular. We took the world’s steepest cog railway to get to the summit, and then took a gondola cable car to get down the other side. It was a fun day which also included a ride in a Rodelbahn (summer bobsled). Here are some pictures we took today.
Kate, Mateo and I went to the Basel Zoo over the easter holiday weekend. The zoo is really great, and they have a good variety of animals. Particularly interesting are the Ape house and the Crocodiles. Here are some of the pictures we took.
A little video of Mateo trying to ski.
The ski school was closed in the afternoon so Jose and I tried to give Mateo a little ski lesson of our own 
Mateo was a great sport and seemed happy to be on ski’s. He practiced with Jose a little bit and then we went to the bunny slope. After the bunny slope, Mateo happily went to the supervised play place for kids and we got a chance to ski ourselves.
Yesterday afternoon we took our inflatable sled and went to a little hill on a field right behind our house to go sledding (sledging for those in the UK)… We took some video of the sled (sledge) runs – and as you can see Mateo had a great time!! Actually we all did 
We woke up this morning to about 4 or 5 inches of fresh snow on the ground. One of Mateo’s favorite passtimes is to throw snowballs for Daphne, who loves to chase after them. We went out for a walk to the field nearby our place, and played in the snow for a while. Here are some pictures which we took. As you can see from the pictures it was still snowing.
We celebrated Mateo’s 3rd birthday with his Big Baci, Baci and Grandpa on Skype and these are pictures from that celebration. Somehow we didn’t get a picture of him blowing out his big 3 candle.
On January 15th I got together with a group of guys and we rented out a winter driving course with instructor. It was a fun day, and I took some photos and video – over 1 1/2 hours of video footage. Most of it was not very interesting, but I boiled it down to about 12 minutes of interesting footage, which I put to some music. Hope you enjoy it -
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