Puppers!

Today was a day trip to Martigny, to visit a very special museum.

We started off the day with the hotel’s breakfast buffet, accompanied by this view:

After that, we wandered around Interlaken a bit until it was time to catch the train to Martigny, a small city in the French part of Switzerland.  The trip was two changes of train and almost two hours of time, but we made it. It felt really odd to be in a French-language area after having been in a German-language area for several days. None of the signs seemed right, the odd snatches of conversation you could get were weird, and overall it just felt wrong, somehow.

On the other hand, the older part of town was charmingly French, so there’s that. 🙂

After quite a lot of walking, we ended up at our destination, Barryland, the Museum of St. Bernard Dogs. It’s a museum that chronicles the history of human passage over the Great Bernard Pass, St. Bernard, and the St. Bernard dogs that have been used there for generations to help travelers. They breed and raise St. Bernards there, and nowadays their jobs are regular outreach activities like visiting school and retirement homes, rather than helping dig exhausted travelers out of the snow.

Here is Rangoon, today’s designated petting dog. Rangoon was almost knocking me over trying to push into my hand for pats.


And here are some more of the current residents.

After that, we went to visit the Roman amphitheater next to the museum, then took the looong walk back to the station, interrupted by a late lunch at a restaurant we passed on the way. What restaurant did we stop at, in this land of French Swiss food?

None other than McDonalds, actually, because we were tired and cranky by then and didn’t want to spend a long time eating, and couldn’t figure out what cafe would just throw a sandwich at us and let us eat quickly. Toby had the “Cheeseburger Royal” in vague honor of Pulp Fiction. And you can definitely say that Mickey D’s has consistency going for it.

Another long train ride back to Interlaken, and we had a much fancier dinner at the Italian restaurant in the hotel, along with tiramisu for Toby and Piedmont pudding for me.

Have a few more photos of the day.


Crossposted all over the place. If you comment on Facebook or the DW feed we may not see them, but @ing telophase or myrialux via Twitter or commenting on the regular DW account, Flickr, and the actual blog should get to us. Or you could just email us@mushtee.com to be absolutely sure we get it.