A beautiful Saturday: Walk from Savigny via the "Tour de Gourze"

Hi everyone! :)
It's the weekend again, and I've been in Lausanne for 5 whole weeks! School work is definitely piling up on me a little, but with good afternoon sessions in the library at the hospital I'm making some progress. We have now finished our first "module", and are moving on to hematology, immunology, and some microbiology in the weeks to come-- I think it'll be really interesting!

The weather is more and more fitting the description of autumn. We're having really changing weather-- really hard rain followed by beautiful sunny days. This weekend though, is the first I've had here where temperatures stayed below 14 degrees all day, and are supposed to drop to about 7 degrees at night. Getting chillier, and my scarves are slowly making their way out of my closet (and generally onto the floor...). I've bought a new autumn/winter coat, and my boots are being allowed out of the "winter-shoe" bag. I guess I'm prepared.

All week, the forecast for today though has been reaaally sunny, and so I wanted to make the most of the upcoming beautiful autumn day. My friend and her boyfriend agreed to join in on the plans, as well as a girl from my class. After some scrutiny of the internet to find a good walk to do which was not too far from Lausanne, we found this site:
http://www.randosuisse.ch/savigny----cully.html

We took the bus at 13:40 from Sallaz in Lausanne toward Savigny. From there we followed a series of small country-side roads leading toward the hill where the Tour de Gourze (the goal of our excursion) is located. We passed farms and large fields, passed through little forested areas, counted at least 5 different species of COWS, saw goats, birds, sheep- you name it. The weather was spectacular, and all the way we had great views of the mountains beyond the lake , especially in toward Montreux and Valais. We turned off the paved roads about a kilometer from the Tour, and a steep forest path led us to the top. It was good we all had good hiking boots on as it was quite slippery with all the fallen leaves! The forest was so beautiful in its newly adopted fall colors, and enormous amounts of mushrooms scattered across the forest floor. I got some great nature shots of the sun shining down between the trees. The Tour de Gourze itself did not look too impressive when we finally found it; it was very... well.. square. But, the view from the top was breathtaking, as is the view from just about anywhere in this country, and we stayed there taking a large amount of pictures and just sighing at the wonderfulness of it all :)

Walking down from the hill toward the lake were more amazing views, and the afternoon sun made sure it didn't get too cold. We met several other hikers along the way, and a moment where I missed my dad a lot when we met 5 men with model airplanes, flying them out across the fields sloping down from the Tour. We went all the way down to a little town called "Grandvaux", where we found the train-tracks of the RER (local area trains), along which was a "tourisme pedestre" path (marked paths all over showing pedestrians where it's nice to walk), next to the tracks. We followed this in the direction of Lausanne, with the intention of going to the bus-station in Lutry, but ending up following further due to the beautiful scenery and wine-ranks we were walking through. We ended up at the Goussiers station, where we exhausted got on a train with two stops back to the main station in Lausanne. As always I think pictures give a better idea than my writing of how my day has been, so here is a selection :)

 

The Tour de Gourze from the backside of the hill

Bye-bye birdies :) off to Italy for the winter...

Hope everyone will have a great weekend! Here it's all books and studying tomorrow, but with this day behind me I don't think it will be too hard to sit inside.
Bisous de la Suisse xx