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Paragliding Video

Paragliding

For Kate’s birthday present, I bought her a day of paragliding.  We took our chances with the weather and got so lucky!  We got 3 flights in each.  It was a great feeling to be up in the air and flying!!  We had a great day!!   Video’s to be posted at a later date.

Day at the Swiss Transportation Museum

Once more we went to the Swiss Transportation museum, one of Mateo’s favorite places in Switzerland. They have completely redone the Car / Truck area, as well as the play area in the main courtyard. Mateo had a lot of fun with construction equipment.

I took some pictures. I was experimenting mostly with using my fixed length 35mm lens (52mm equivalent on a full frame camera), and also using the pop-up flash diffuser for the indoor shots.

Trip to Jungfraujoch

We went to Jungfraujoch, the Top of Europe on June 14th.  We took a lot of pictures.

The longest Rodelbahn in the world

We went to an Alpine Coaster for Kate’s birthday. We had gorgeous weather and had a lot of fun riding the Rodelbahn!

Trip to Lugano

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.

Trip to Mount Pilatus

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.

Trip to the Basel Zoo

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.

Video of Mateo skiing

A little video of Mateo trying to ski.

Mateo tries skiing!

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.