Our very, very last photos from that lovely visit in Switzerland’s Ticino canton last year. Above and several below from Locarno; also a last shot or two from Melide, Bissone, Campione d’Italia and Morcote.
Last photos from Bodø, which was our first port call after entering the arctic circle in the wee hours of 23 January, and is both the capital and the largest city of Norway’s Nordland County.
The last remaining part of the second city walls of Brussels, the Porte de Halle (FR) / Hallepoort (FL) / Halle Gate (EN) is now part the Royal Museums of Art and History, ergot Ah, Royalty material. It was originally built in the 1300s, same general time frame as the Keep at Vincennes. It’s been remodeled often since. I happened past it during my walk to the train station after some meetings in Brussels back in April.
In earlier posts from Vincennes, we told you about the Keep, which you see rising to the right above. We also promised to tell you more about the later buildings which you could see in a few shots taken from inside the Keep. Herewith those last explanations and indeed pretty much last photos from Vincennes. Louis XIV, often referred to as the Sun King, built The King’s Pavilion above in the 1650s. (Along with the Queen’s Pavilion, behind me when I took this photo but visible behind construction scaffolding in a few other shots below. Sheesh: royal spouses apparently aren’t satisfied with different bedrooms, they want whole different buildings, in this case on French tax budgets. No wonder those French peasants started their revolution – and no doubt the Bourbon descendants rue the fact that they hadn’t yet drawn enough attention to immigrants as the cause of all problems, in order to direct the guillotines away from royalty and towards far more defenseless individuals. Of course, for our North American first nations, we immigrants sure as heck were the root of some pretty major new problems.)
But back to old Sunny, the King: his was the last royal court to live at Vincennes. Unsatisfied with Vincennes’ proximity to the actual city of Paris, he built and moved to Versailles, deeper into the suburbs, about thirty years later.
This is it, folks: last of the Swiss mountains, some from my walks in and around Morcote (above), Bissone and Lugano, several from around the Centovalli town of Camedo, and also some from the hanging-bridge walk in the mountains on the north of the valley that runs between Bellinzona and Lago Maggiore / Locarno. (E.g. the bigger photo at the bottom with a lovely crescent moon.) It’s a lot, but some of them sure are lovely, eh?
The ground-level photos in this post are our last of Lago Maggiore at its northernmost end, in Locarno. I’m pretty confident that the shot at the very bottom of the post shows most of the rest of Lago Maggiore, and even a wee bit of the westernmost arm of Lake Lugano (the part you can see, looking down from an amazing overlook in Morcote, in this photo from an earlier post), as seen from the airplane on Sunday afternoon the 15th of June, as our plane flew south from Amsterdam to Rome.
(so much world, so little time....) 