Showshoeing in Les Diablerets

On the weekend we went snowshoeing again in Les Diablerets. Once again we had an amazing time in the snow, which was knee deep powder even down in the village and with Raquettes on our feet.

I think there will be a lot more posts on our Raquetting adventures in the future!

A proper swiss winter

Through the whole of last winter it snowed for about 5 seconds in where we live in Vevey and then it melted immediately, which was a bit disappointing. Already this year we've had quite a lot of snow falling in Vevey and pretty much everywhere else in Switzerland!

The other night it was really coming down in our square where the Village Finlandais is set up, so of course I took some photos.

In Australia I would really resent cold weather since it just seems to limit what you can do, but in Switzerland it means snow; which really transforms the landscape making everything look quite spectacular and also creates a whole range of new activities to explore. Consequentially, I'm really excited about having what I consider to be a proper Swiss winter ahead of us!

Les Mosses

After our wonderful time the weekend before in Les Diablerets, we promptly went out and bought ourselves our own raquettes, since we figured we'd be doing a lot more snow-shoeing in future.

To try them out, we took ourselves up to Les Mosses, which is about an hour from Vevey by car (having now fitted our snow tires), and picked the most scenic of the raquette trails to explore.

We had a great time walking through the pine forest with snow on the branches, and past frozen streams up onto a plateau above the village before stopping for a picnic in the snow of tea and cold pizza we'd picked up in the markets in Vevey.

We got a bit lost at this point, following some more ambitious raquetters than us still further up the mountain, but got ourselves back on track to explore around the plateau some more before heading back down through the forest towards the village.

It was just as well we headed back when we did, as it started to get dark and really quite cold by the time we were back to our car.

We had a great time for almost no cost (in fact, we actually made some money due to a free tank of petrol thanks to a non-functioning petrol bowser at the petrol station) and it's really great to think we can just throw the raquettes in the car and drive somewhere and have a great day in the snow!