Alps and Riviera

The first day ended in Salzburg. We walked through the old town below the Hohensalzburg fortress, along the narrow lanes with their wrought-iron shop signs, and finished in the Mirabell Gardens, with their flower beds laid out in front of the view of the fortress. We slept in Munich.

The next morning we crossed into Liechtenstein. In Vaduz, the tiny capital, the prince’s castle sits on the hillside above a compact centre of modern buildings: the black cube of the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein and the brick-coloured Landtag, the parliament building.

In the afternoon we stopped in Chur, the capital of Graubünden and one of the oldest towns in Switzerland, for a walk through the lanes and small squares of its old town.

For two nights our base was Laax, a village above the Rhine valley best known for skiing. In June it was green and quiet. We spent a day by the Laaxersee, a small lake just below the village, where the shallow water at the edge was perfect for splashing about and dragonflies rested on the warm rocks, and in the evening a rainbow came out over the mountains.

Just east of Laax, the Rhine has cut a deep gorge through the remains of an ancient landslide. From the Il Spir viewing platform above the gorge, the Ruinaulta, you look straight down onto the river and the railway winding along it between white cliffs. From there a forest path took us to the Caumasee, a turquoise lake in the woods below Flims.

In the early evening we left Laax and headed south, stopping on the way in a village of old timber barns and stark, modern white houses.

On the San Bernardino route over the Alps we came down into Ticino, the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, and spent the evening in Bellinzona. Its three medieval castles are on the UNESCO World Heritage list. We went up to Castelgrande through a lift cut into the rock, sat on the lawn inside its walls as the light faded, and saw the castle walls lit up above the town at night.

Then we drove on through the night, across northern Italy to the Ligurian coast.

After a short night near Loano we followed the coast west past Sanremo into France. For two nights we stayed inland from Antibes, with a day in Cannes and a day in Monaco.

From our base in Saint-Raphaël we drove to Saint-Tropez. It was market day on the Place des Lices, with stalls of saucisson and other local food under the plane trees, where men were playing pétanque. We visited the cinema museum in the old Gendarmerie, made famous by the Louis de Funès films, walked along the harbour full of yachts and through the pastel-coloured lanes of the old town, and spent the late afternoon on the long sandy beach of Pampelonne, with yachts anchored offshore.

On our last day by the sea we walked through a vineyard on the edge of Saint-Raphaël, right next to the E.Leclerc supermarket, among rows of vines with a stone farmhouse in the middle, and spent the evening on the town beach in Saint-Raphaël, in the low sun next to the Ferris wheel and the dome of the basilica.

Heading home, we stopped in Aix-en-Provence: the Cours Mirabeau with its moss-covered fountain, the honey-coloured mansions of the old town and the big Fontaine de la Rotonde. On the motorway north we passed the first purple lavender fields, and in the evening we walked through Geneva.

The next morning we visited CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics, on the French–Swiss border outside Geneva. In front of the visitor centre stand old pieces of equipment from earlier experiments, and in the exhibitions we saw a section of one of the magnets of the Large Hadron Collider, the 27-kilometre ring buried deep under the countryside.

The last stop was the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, just across the border from Basel. The furniture company has filled its grounds with buildings by famous architects: Frank Gehry’s design museum, Zaha Hadid’s angular fire station, the stacked houses of the VitraHaus by Herzog & de Meuron, and a slide tower by Carsten Höller. Between them grows a wild meadow garden by Piet Oudolf.

From there it was a long drive through the night back home.