Appenzell

After finally fixing the heating in the car, we drove across country into Eastern Switzerland where we would spend the remainder of our Christmas holidays.

We stayed in Appenzell for 3 nights, which is a quiet but pretty town in the centre of Appenzellerland.

While at Appenzell, we visited the Cheeze factory and cultural museum in Steig (Appenzell cheeze being very famous in Switzerland). We bought some EXTRA grade cheeze, which is apparently the pinacle of Appenzell cheeze, and is indeed delicious.

We also drove into St. Gallen to see the historical Abbey Library, where I got into a lot of trouble for attempting to take a photo of the door leading into the library.

We were hoping to find a countryside of rolling, snow-covered, hills, since that is what you'll find on the tourism website, and we had indeed had some very cold weather, but by the time we arrived the snow had all melted and instead we had rolling, green, hills.

It was still very nice of course, but I think we offended some people by suggesting that green rolling hills wasn't quite what we wanted from Appenzell.

We consoled ourselves by catching a lift up a mountain, where it was blizzarding, and we made the short hike up the mountain for a very nice sausage and gravy (although Linda tried to be healthy and had soup - and regretted the decision somewhat).

Appenzell was also where we spent NYE - but more on that later.