i am starting a little early..planning my trip for april 2014...but we will be traveling from venice to paris. going right through the middle of switzerland. my 11 year old wants to make a stop and visit for the day....any suggestions..i would like to travel atleast 4 and a half hours so it breaks the trip up a good bit. Where would be a good place that we could just poke around for the day, or 1 night..would be willing to spend one day and night there. also, if we dont spend the night, any suggestions on what to do with our luggage while we sightsee?
thanks for your help!
traveling from Venice to Paris..would like to stop in Switzerland
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forgot to mention...we would like to visit a castle while in switzerland...thanks!
You will definitely need to stay at least one night - with all that travel and wanting to see some of Switz.
IMHO I would go for mountains rather than a castle (there are castles everywhere).
Castles you might consider are
Chillon (near Montreaux)
Thun (in Thun)
Gruyere (also Gruyere)
The latter two are very small towns and Montreaux is a sort of mid size town.
For how to get there you will need to do some tracking on the train web sites to plan out a trip (there will probably be a couple of changes).
If it were me I would go to Lucerne, which is charming and has lots to do, has a Lake steamer that visits various small towns and you can ascend Mt Pilatus or one of the others - by cable car or cog railway.
Note; April can still be very cold in the mountains.
the town where Chillon is near is Montreux (not Montreaux). And Chillon is actually a cool castle if you go there, there is a bus to it from town http://www.chillon.ch/en/index.cfm
But if you already know you are going through the middle of Switzerland (how do you know this? How are you going?), it would seem you should go someplace in your way. Lucerne would be about in the middle and I agree that would be a good place to stop off for a bit. There are some castles around there, I don't remember if you can see any if you take a lake boat tour or not. There is a castle that is a hotel you can see which is on a hill overlooking the city. The train goes from Venice to Lucerne, also, I think.
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