The Plan: bike 90+km to Yverdon-les-Bains, overnight at a hotel, bike home along the north side of Lake Neuchatel. The actual trip: bike 96km over too many hills in too hot weather with too little sunscreen, try to lift legs to walk through Yverdon, collapse in worse-than-basic hotel room, eat hotel’s petite dejeuner (not a Swiss-style fruhstuck), strain over steep terraced hillsides to Neuchatel, let the SBB do the pedaling from there to Bern. In other words, we had another great weekend! Herewith the pics.
Tiny Murten has a big reputation. It has a nice medieval old town and a nearly fully preserved town wall. We sampled the local specialty: Nidelkuchen (cream cake).
Throughout Switzerland there are remains of Roman rule. We climbed the hill in Avenches to see its ancient amphitheater.
North of Yverdon are menhirs (standing stones), some five thousand years old. They were reset in their original positions in 1986, one of many clusters of Neolithic stone circles and dolmens near Lake Neuchâtel.
A brief pause, after climbing through the vineyards, by an old palace. There was someone working on the landscaping, so I casually asked him (in French) whether this place was his. He told me no, but it is for sale. Perhaps I would like to buy?
The Eglise Collégial, Neuchâtel’s Cathedral, has a 1372 ‘Monument to the Counts’, memorial statues to its rulers. During the Reformation, the town folk so identified this as purely Neuchâtelois that they refused to tear it down when the rest of the artwork was being destroyed.
Beside the Eglise stands a former chateau, now a public building where government business is conducted. The courtroom’s walls are lined with heraldic shields which tell the history of the town’s rulers.
