Our European Adventure: Le Père Noël vole!

I don’t think I could have been more excited about this trip. We told the kids nothing about it besides we were going to ride on a train. Which, quite frankly, isn’t a lot of information because many of our trips right now involve a train of some sort.

We traveled to Montreux, Switzerland. It’s on the French side of the country. In fact, the other side of the lake in the pictures of the Christmas Market is France.

We got to our hotel and dropped our bags then headed into the market.

Usually when I tell her not to smile for a photo I get the biggest grin.
Today I got a petrified cat.

Can we just take a moment and discuss how amazing fondue bread is as a dinner?
They take a 10” French bread roll and poke a hole in the middle then fill it with fondue
cheese. These people are geniuses.

After snacking our way through dinner, the highlight of the night was a flyby from the jolly old man himself.

How cool is that? Watch it again with the sound to get Charlotte’s full commentary and amazement. Remember, they had no idea this was going to happen. The surprise and excitement was the best gift I’ll have all season.

After the excitement of seeing Santa, the girls were about done.

So we sent the kids back to the hotel with Adam’s parents while he & I had a mini-date night at the market. We sipped mulled wine, browsed shops (and even touched things without worrying about being a bad example!), and rode the Ferris Wheel. All as grown ups. 10/10. Highly recommend.

The next morning the excitement level was way up again. It started with us boarding a beautiful cogwheel train up the mountain with exquisite views of the lake and Swiss alps on all sides.

This is the equivalent of "are we there yet?"

At the top of the mountain is Rochers de Naye - a little over 6700ft up. We disembarked the train and walked through a long tunnel lined with twinkle lights to reach Santa’s grotto.

At the end of the tunnel we got to visit with Santa. I was impressed at how well the set up worked. An elf stood at the entrance and pre chatted with the kids to pick up names and which language they were most comfortable in. Even I didn’t realize what she was doing at first. Then she would introduce them to Santa … e.g., ‘Bonjour Père Noël, c'est Timmy de Paris’ or ‘Hallo Sankt Nikolaus, hier ist Hans aus Berlin’ or (in our case) ‘Hi Santa, look! It’s Charlotte & Olivia from Texas!’ In our time there, I heard him speak English, Italian, French & German. How truly magical!

Each child got a few minutes with Santa to chat about Christmas wishes. Charlotte asked him if he’d received her letter, which was a surprise to me as I didn’t know she’d sent him a letter. Thankfully he said yes. I later found out that they’d written letters at school.

We then got to walk through a little side area where both my children signed a book certifying that they had been good all year long ... hoping nobody audits those records. They then received a little gift bag with some fruit, chocolates and a teddy bear included.

We took some time to enjoy a hot chocolate in Santa’s grotto and look around at all the decor before heading back down the twinkly walkway to the train.