For Christmas 2021 we gave the kids 4 options to chose from for the family holiday. Christmas in Lapland with Santa, Skiing in Austria, a week with the Grand parents or Christmas in Egypt with Pyramids and Mummies. Guess what they chose, much to my own delight? Jump to conclusions of trip -> So, the planning for Egypt began. We have travelled in a number of MENA countries and knowing some of the difficulties with these places we decided to book a private package trip, to still have some control over the travel plans but to have someone else...
Family Train Trip to Prague
For Easter 2022 we decided to take a trip to Prague with the children by train directly from home in St-Cergue. We love taking train trips and have taken a few epic ones over the years, so when we thought about a trip to Prague we looked to see if there was a way to get to there by train. It just so happens that there is in fact a direct sleeper train from Zurich to Prague operated by the Czech railway company. The tickets are only released 60 days before the journey and for popular weekends they sell out...
Upgrading Audi A4 (B8) to Android Auto
We have had our Audi A4 (B8) for a long time now and it has served us well. It is not as nice as the one I wrote off in 2016 but this car is still going strong despite being an 8-year-old car and having driven over 170,000 kms. But every now and again we talk about getting a new car, and for me, one of the main reasons I would like a new car is because the old entertainment system in our Audi seems very dated. While I get great Bluetooth connectivity for phone calls that is the only...
Kiwico crates - first impressions
While searching around on the net a month or so ago I came across a company called KiwiCo. They do age appropriate boxes of fun activities to promote STEAM (previously stem, Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths) from 0 to 104 (according to their site). You can get individual crates or a monthly subscription. The concept looked great so I ordered a 12 month subscription. A week or two ago Kieran's first KiwiCo create arrived and we worked together today to make it. The instructions are very simple to follow, all the parts are pre cut and there...
Solar Instalation
Recently we decided to instal solar panels on our chalet in St-Cergue. While it is nice to be able to have green energy this was not our main reason to take this project one. We see ourselves living in this house for a long time and with the number of people in the house, the size and the fact that the whole house, including heating and cooking, is electric our bills were very high. So, right back at the end of last winter we decided to investigate getting panels put on our roof. I actually decided to go with IKEA...
KLM long haul and Schiphol airport
Just recently I travelled from Switzerland to South Africa on KLM flying via Schiphol Airport. I had not heard too many things about KLM and I went with the thought that hearing little about them also means they can not be too bad. On the flight over this...