Le Chic En Rose

Diaries of an independent traveller

A pleasant ferry ride across the Puget Sound from Seattle Docks, Bainbridge Island, is a popular destination for a day trip from the city and a magnet for tourists visiting the area. We went on a Sunday, which was quite busy, but not unpleasantly so. Perhaps the lingering smoke haze from the nearby wildfires in …

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Monsieur recently bought a small print of the six Nyoongar seasons. It is an excellent way to understand the weather patterns in the south western part of WA. April and May represent Djeran season, “Djeran is marked by cooler nights, dewy mornings and when leaves fall to the ground. Ngari (salmon) are prolific” It is a beautiful time …

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Heading back along the Trans-Canada Highway towards Vancouver we stopped off for a break at the Spiral Tunnels look-out point west of Lake Louise. Now back across the border in British Colombia (clocks go back an hour to Pacific Time) we were retracing some of the journey we had made on the Rocky Mountaineer (see …

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One of the highlights of our North American trip was taking the famous Rocky Mountaineer train from Vancouver to Banff. This route is one of the company’s most popular and its name, “First Passage to the West” aptly describes its links with the past. Following in the footsteps (well actually on board a luxury train) …

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I’ve written about the excellent Hotham Valley Tourist Railway before (see here).     Taking advantage of a gorgeous crisp winter’s WA day (after the heavy storms of the previous few weeks) we planned a similar outing down to Dwellingup last weekend. This time, however, the Steam Ranger train wasn’t operating – maintenance issues and …

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I’m finally getting round to finishing off the series of posts about last year’s Swiss trip (see here for posts about that trip and some archived ones from earlier travels). I left off in Spiez, the delightful little town on the shores of Thunersee, where we based ourselves for 3 nights (see here, here and …

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I did a quick preview of our trip on the Gornergrat Bahn in last week’s post (see here). Like so many other things in Switzerland the little cogwheel railway is another masterpiece of engineering in a difficult terrain.     Obviously we were going up a mountain but in comparison with other railways we’d been …

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I opened up the “West Australian” newspaper yesterday morning to find an interesting article on the 125th anniversary of the Glion Rochers-de-Naye Railway, which we visited back in May (see here and here for previous posts). Quoting from the article, “The land painting entitled, “A Story Of The Future” by French artist Saype, depicts a …

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We had a very brief sojourn in Zermatt (about 30 minutes to be precise) a few years ago as we waited to start our trip across to St Moritz on the Glacier Express. We’d come up from Brig down in the Rhone Valley early in the morning. There was just enough time for a quick …

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After a few days enjoying the Montreux area it was time to move on to our next destination, the little town of Spiez on Lake Thun. Being Switzerland, the journey is often as enjoyable as the destination. The Golden Pass line connects Montreux with Lucerne in the heartland of Switzerland. It’s actually a 3 stage …

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