Swiss alps from the air

I have to admit that I wasn't too fussed about seeing the Swiss alps, as we'd seen Norway, it'd scared the #*!% out of me, and frankly what could beat Norway for otherworldly otherness?  But the weather was so good......  One of Gisi's neighbours is a SwissAir captain and she agreed that the clear air was a rare phenomenon.  So we rudely disappeared overnight.  Our plane's wing tanks are long and shallow, this means that it is very hard to judge how much petrol we have in the tanks, so we made a precautionary landing in Grenchen and decided to stay for the night.

We managed to leave our camera batteries charging at Kerstin's when we left, which meant that we were left with the small and the video cameras (also without much battery life), so apologies for the quality of the images.  I really like glaciers so there are a few nice images below.  More images are on Julian's blog.

Now since according to Wikipedia the glaciers on the Swiss alps take up 1230km2, you'll have to excuse me for giving you a couple more glacier pix.....

Looks almost like a road, doesn't it???

In order to get over the alps, we had to fly pretty high, in fact there were clouds below us....

This was the highest we've ever flown: 12 300 feet (3750m), the altitude didn't really agree with Julian so luckily we only spent 30mins that high.

It was a pretty spectacular day's flying.  We stopped for a break in Lugano, only to discover that the town itself was on the other side of a mountain range only to be reached via a bus then a train, so we'll save Lugano for a future trip.