3/12/21 Here is the incredibly simple official site that tells you under what conditions you can enter Switzerland given your current situation: https://travelcheck.admin.ch Here is a handy online booking site for COVID tests: https://www.onedoc.ch/en/covid-testing-center/riddes Switzerland’s Federal Council today made the following announcement, reversing the quarantine requirements brought into force over the last week (see […]
We went hunting for Edelweiss one late summer’s day on the mountainside above La Tzoumaz. See if you can read the whole story without bursting into song! A few weeks ago we bumped into a local couple out hiking up the Col des Mines. Leaning on their hiking poles, they were delighted to stop and share their […]
We often wonder what it’s like for our clients to have a summer chalet holiday in La Tzoumaz, so we decided to find out for ourselves. Most of our visitors are not single families or groups of friends, but are three-generational families or two-family groups. To simulate these conditions, we recruited some friends whose children […]
Switzerland has amazing mountains. We love hiking the mountains, especially with my older children (who were aged 5 & 7 at the time of writing this piece). The question: How to transfer a love of hiking to children? Here are 10 ideas and 10 tips to get children hiking. Designing the hike 1) Go up! […]
“What’s that over there daddy?” asks John. The closest view from our window is of the golden larch forests above Iserables. Each evening we see the lights of the small town, with buildings scattered in the forest. So we decide the next day we’ll go there. Leaving La Tzoumaz, Andrew admires the lawns of the […]
Here are just a few of the millions and millions of flowers I have seen whilst out and about on the mountainside this week. It’s true that some are to be found in people’s gardens, but many are just growing wild and free! People tend to mow their lawns and strim their steeply-banked gardens around the […]
I’ve always loved the mountains for their raw, wild beauty. They are huge and untamed. Majestic and un-mastered. They seem so massive and unmoveable, but were somehow thrown up by the shifting of the Earth’s tectonic plates millions of years ago. Now that I live in the mountains, I feel the need to step closer, […]
From the age of 5, I used to dream about skiing for 51 weeks of the year. As a family, we’d look through our printed photos from the previous years, and shout excitedly at Franz Klammer and Pirmin Zurbriggen on Ski Sunday. We’d even sit in a line on the sofa and make chairlift-bumping-over-a-pylon noises […]