Holiday in a weekend

We just arrived back from a wonderful weekend in the Swiss mountains. It was gorgeous and refreshing and relaxing and tiring all at the same time. And we tried to really make the most of it because this appears to be our holiday for the year! But these 48 hours were really just lovely and I am SO pleased that we made the effort to go.

We were visiting friends we haven't seen since we all went our separate ways at the end of the MBA in September 1999. He is Swiss, she is Japanese and they live in Japan so the likelihood of us catching up over the last years have been remote even though they travel back to Europe on an irregular basis. For a weekend trip, Europe is really small and everywhere is local when you live here but if you are travelling in for business from another continent, then the time it would take to just "pop" over to Germany from Paris for example is too much and so our paths just have not crossed over the years. But when the offer came to go down to the Alps for a quick visit, we hardly had to stop and think twice. We had our flights booked quicker than a blink of an eye. Arriving in Zurich on Friday evening, we picked up a car on Saturday and drove the short one hour to a small town on the banks of a lake a short distance from Lucerne. Living in the industrial heartland of Germany, this is another world for us. Clear blue waters, lush green mountains, typically Alpine architecture - it has it all. It was all very "Heidi" for us and I was enthralled with the place.

It was wonderful to catch up with old friends and talk about old times as well as what life has dealt us over the intervening years. There was an awful lot of laughter and fun and we said over and over that we could not believe it was "10 YEARS!"

So many changes and so much has happened and yet, we hardly stopped chatting the whole time. It felt good and we were so comfortable together. It was just a lovely weekend. Fresh mountain air did a good job of blowing the stresses of recent days away, even if only for the time we were there.

Feeling inspired and ready to create.