[Previous post: part 4]

The next day we used the mobile app to plot our 5-hop journey from Wengen to Glion. We travelled from Wengen to Lauterbrunn, then to Interlaken Ost, then to Visp, then Montreux, and finally a cog rail train to Glion-Alpes. Some of the trains had playgrounds on them, complete with small slides and climbing areas. The cog train was much noisier than the previous trains we rode. The whole excursion took less than 3 hours and all the connections worked perfectly.

I went to Glion for the Second Annual Summit of Centers for Digital Trust, which was organized by the Center for Digital Trust at EPFL and held at the lovely Hotel Victoria. It was fun to meet center directors from around the world and compare notes.

I returned to my hotel room the first day and found a small herd of cows right outside my window. That evening I discovered that cows do not actually go to sleep when it gets dark, and even when they do finally lie down, their cow bells never stop ringing (and yes, every cow in Switzerland wears a huge bell around its neck). Watch (and listen to) this very short video clip of cows outside my window! Later in the week the cows even stopped by our meeting.

The views from Hotel Victoria were beautiful day and night and the chalet where we held most of our discussions was quite charming. The weather was perfect and we had all of our meals on the hotel’s covered patio. The food was great and lunch was served in three courses, with wine.

The Summit’s main social event was a trip via funicular and boat ride from Montreaux to Cully, where we visited a woman-owned winery and had dinner at a wonderful restaurant by the train station. This (and many other wineries in the area) uses grapes grown on the mountainside lining Lake Geneva. Our boat left from a port near Chillon Castle, a medieval castle.

Next up: Part 6: Rochers-de-Naye