Spend some time around Mâcon to discover lesser-known, better-value fine French wines

The closer we get to the UK's departure from the European Union (29 March 2019), the longer grows the lists of unknowns. Assuming Bencard employment unaffected, one of the biggest worries in our household is what will happen to French wine imports.

Optimists in the leave camp insist trade will continue as normal. I expect that inexpensive, everyday wine will always find its way to British tables from somewhere. But since Burgundy lay directly in the path to our holiday, we thought we'd take the "better safe than sorry" approach on the good stuff. The cellar is now topped up with fine wines that will peak in the next two to seven years. If the post-Brexit economy does go to hell in a hand basket, at least we'll be serving some great wine at our dinner parties. We'll also have our memories of discovering two wonderful new (to us) wine regions: the Mâconnais and Northern Beaujolais.

The Mâconnais is Burgundy, but not as most people know it. The region's most famous wines come from a stretch of magical road on either side of the charming town of Beaune. (I've writing several times of this region in the past; just search "Burgundy" for more.)

This year, we had two objectives: Rounding out the high quality white wine in our cellar and continuing my husband's efforts to convince me that light reds deserve as much love as their big, bold cousins. This region was a great place to accomplish both, at much lower prices than in the two famous côtes to the north.

BASE CAMP
We based ourselves in Mâcon for three nights. The town that gives its name to the region is a thriving administration centre, more modern and less charming than Beaune. It does, however, gain ambiance from lying next to a broad, placid and picturesque stretch of the River Saône. In the old part of town, buildings are painted in cheery pastel colours; it's as if you've drifted over some invisible line into The South. There are doubtless scores of boutique hotels and vineyard-based accommodation in the area, but we went for practicality. The Mercure is on the river, affordable, a pleasant walk from the town centre, with comfortable rooms and plenty of parking. While the web site says they have a restaurant, it's really only a banqueting facility for group tours. A ten-minute stroll takes you to the best place to start your explorations in the region, whether or not you're staying at the Mercure: the Maison Mâconnaise des Vins.

This complex along the D906 main road comprises the offices of the local association of wine growers, a shop representing local growers that offers a range of tastings and a restaurant.

A large dining room and a broad veranda for al fresco meals serve up local specialties with ... naturally ... an impressive wine list. (American visitors will be amused to see that the main building's white, columned front gives it the look of an antebellum mansion, saying Macon, Georgia more than Mâcon, France.) We've always believed that the best way to understand local wines is to go to a good local restaurant and let the waiters help with introductions via food pairings. The Maison didn't let us down. In fact, we were so delighted we ate here two of our three nights in town.

Burgundy is famous for its Charolais cattle and their beef dominates the menu here, from tartare to grilled fillets and unctuous, marrow-filled bones. That gave us the excuse to try two reds new to us: Saint-Amour, one of the Beaujolais Cru, and Mercurey, a Burgundy from the Côte Chalonnaise. The former, with its fruity, smooth and slightly spicy profile, was to be our favourite discovery of the trip. We needed to taste the whites as well, of course, so chose our starters accordingly from an impressive range of salads, terrines and foie gras. It was here that we first encountered the range of wines that fall into the category of Pouilly Fuissé and started to explore what we might like to buy.

The shop below, of course, makes that easy. Curiously, however, the place doesn't seem to be attuned to foreign tourism. There's a regular flow of locals picking up stuff for their own consumption, but the fact that any information beyond the basics came to us in French limits the market. Fortunately, between the two of us we can get by fairly well, so were able to use our experience here as basic training before heading out into the fields. And, thankfully, for a bit of buying on our last day, after we discovered just how challenging tasting would be.

Thanks to a blazingly hot, sunny and dry summer, the 2018 grape harvest is, on average, two weeks early. Makers are ecstatic at the concentrated sugars in their fruit and are predicting one of the great vintages. So rather than catching makers with time on their hands as they waited for that final ripening, we drove past fields buzzing with pickers and tasting rooms closed tight. "Je suis vraiment désolé, c'est la vendage" was the phrase of the moment.

DAZZLING WHITES
The fact that Burgundy makes great whites should come as no surprise. Mersault, Montrachet and
Chablis are legendary names. Pouilly Fuissé belongs amongst them. It's also Burgundy, also made from Chardonnay, but lesser known. This is possibly because there are no Grand Cru in the Mâconnais. Officially, it's because the growers here never bothered to apply when the formal designations were being made. According to local stories, it's because this part of France was below the German occupation line in WW2. In an attempt to get locals on side, German High Command had excluded Grand Crus from the wines that occupying forces were allowed to commandeer. Thus there was a scramble in occupied territories to give every field they could justify the top classification. Below the occupation line, there was no need ... and farmers had better things to do.

Given that French classifications rarely change once set, a fluke of history means that the wines of this region are forever excluded from the official premier league. That's a great thing for the buyer, who can find the same qualities of Burgundy's bigger names ... including the ability to mature to complex richness ... at a much smaller price.

Start at L'Atrium in Solutré for an introduction to the region. This shop represents 450 growers in the area and, most importantly, offers structured tastings to introduce you to differences in terroir. The generic term of Pouilly Fuissé, it turns out, covers five "climats" (villages and their surrounding area), each of which have slightly different qualities in their finished wines. Moving from northwest to southeast, and from highest elevation to lowest, these are Vergisson, Solutré, Pouilly, Fuissé, Chaintré. The more famous Fuissé was our favourite, but we also like the Vergisson and the Pouilly.

L'Atrium plain labels a representative set of wines from the climats for their tastings, regularly changing producers, to give you typical flavours. You can buy these, or take advice from them and buy from their stock of other producers. We kept exploring, in search of a vigneron open despite the vendage.

It took a while to find one, but we had a glorious drive en route. This is a much wilder, more dramatic landscape than the gentle slopes of Northern Burgundy. Great rock escarpments jut up from the valley floor. Roads twist through deep forest. Villages cling to steep hills. The rock of Solutré stands at the heart of the region, both a popular destination for hikers and a dramatic element in the landscape that you can navigate by.

By sheer luck we stumbled into Pierre Vessigaud's tasting room while looking for someone else. This was exactly the kind of maker we were looking for: the fifth-generation producing here, one of the first in region to go organic in the mid-'90s, working across multiple climats in the AOC and with a vineyard in Saint-Amour, still hand-picking their grapes and dedicated to high-quality, boutique production. Vessigaud provides Pouilly Fuissé to BA's first class cabins, and ended up being the producer from whom we made our largest single purchase of the trip.

They also pointed us towards L'O des Vignes in Fuissé for lunch. Set in a pretty, early 20th-century farm house on the village's main street, there's a choice of two options here: a Michelin-starred restaurant at the back,  where the original interiors have been transformed into something surprisingly sleek and modern, or a classically traditional wine bar facing the street with oak tables and menus on blackboards. Having just shot the days budget Chez Vessigaud, we opted for the wine bar. Good, but unexceptional, traditional food with a great wine list. I suspect we missed out by not going to the full restaurant, which had tables available and was offering an intriguing multi-course menu. We noted that this was a restaurant with rooms, and it might be an ideal place to stop off on some future visit.

LIGHT REDS
By not bothering to pursue grand cru registration, you can argue that the makers of Pouilly Fuissé undermined themselves with a lack of ambition. In the Beaujolais, you might say they suffer from too much of it.

In the 1980s the Beaujolais Nouveau marketing campaign exceeded everyone's expectations, and suddenly the world was drinking far too much bad, young wine that never should have crossed the vigneron's threshold. By 2001, a backlash against Nouveau saw producers destroying more than a million cases, since nobody was buying and this cheap and cheerful stuff doesn't age. Later in the decade, mega-producer George Deboeuf ended up in court on a charge of mis-labelling after older vintages were mixed in to make a bad 2004 harvest taste better, while other producers were hauled up for illegally spiking their production with sugar. Beaujolais' reputation was at its nadir.

The region has been fighting back by getting serious buyers to focus on its ten cru. These are the most acclaimed wines in the area, grown in the foothills of the Beaujolais mountains and all produced from the notoriously tricky Gamay grape. (Treated well, it can be sublime, but in less talented hands it's often thin and bitter.) Tellingly, the cru tend not to put Beaujolais on their labels and are legally not allowed to produce Nouveau.

The cru, from the lightest to the heaviest, are: Brouilly, Régnié, Chiroubles, Côte de Brouilly, Fleurie, Saint-Amour, Chénas, Juliénas, Morgon and Moulin-à-Vent. The first three are generally thought to be good for three years in the cellar, the next three for four years and the last for up to 10, though some Moulin-à-Vent is considered as good as Burgundian Grand Cru and could mature for up to 20 years.

While Beaujolais is an enormous region, stretching more than 35 miles, the cru are all clustered together in an area just over the border from the Mâconnais, making this a logical inclusion addition to a Southern Burgundy trip.

Having learned our lesson with the harvest, we concentrated on restaurants and wine shops for our tastings and found that our favourites were Fleurie, Saint-Amour and Juliénas. With time running short, and cases of the last two already in the boot, we headed to Fleurie to taste more.

Fleurie is a pretty little town about half way up a big hill, with a church at the crossroads, a tiny market on Saturdays where locals sell bread, produce and crafts out of the back of their cars, and several shops offering tastings from multiple makers. We stumbled into La Maison du Cru Fleurie, primarily because they have the good fortune to share a door with the local tourism office.

La Maison is a small place representing just 25 of the scores of domaines making Fleurie. Each day, a different domaine has control of the shop. And though they're happy to recommend and sell you other producers' bottles, you'll really be focusing on whoever the luck of the draw gave you on the day you come in.

Fate dealt us a good hand. The Domaine de Chante-Terre not only has a surprising range of wines from across their relatively tiny (6 acres) vineyards, but had a son of the household with enough English to explain the variations in terroir and vinification that led to differences in what we were tasting. We fell in love with their 2017 gold-medal winning "Florence et Jacques Colin", the wine so good the makers put their own names on it. We learned that they're passionate about making traditional, elegant wines from their 60-year-old vines, with a blackcurrant nose, flowery minerality and a raspberry coulis finish.

While I couldn't have come up with that myself, the description fit. Light yet flavourful, fruity yet well-rounded, and should be even better in a year or two. We also fell in love with the price. At £11 a bottle it was some of the cheapest wine we bought the whole trip, even though it was just as good, and had similar aging potential, as the more expensive Saint-Amour, Juliénas and Mercurey already in the boot of the car. Had we come to Fleurie first, I suspect our purchasing profile would have been very different.

THE DANGERS OF REPETITION
Our least enjoyable day was, ironically, the one we'd forecast to be special. Five years earlier, on our first trip together to Burgundy, my husband and I had stumbled into a small restaurant in a relatively-undiscovered village in the Cote de Nuits to have not only one of our favourite meals of the trip (review here), but to discover our favourite Burgundian red. Restaurant Au Clos Napoleon has loomed large in our memory ever since, while every bottle in the case of their own-label Fixin that we brought home both improved with age, and reminded us of a magical day.

We thought we'd do it again. We failed.

Remembering a cosy, almost-empty place, we didn't bother to book. Mistake. Clearly, in the five years since our visit this spot has been discovered. And heavily refurbished into something far more trendy and fashionable than our memory. It was packed. No tables available. We should have come earlier. (It was 1:45.) But we could still buy wine at their shop down the hill, which was due to re-open from their lunch break at 2.

So we wandered down the hill we'd just hiked up, stopping at every place that served food looking for options. (He wandered. I limped. Entranced by the view on the ascent, I'd tripped, scraped my knee badly and twisted my ankle. I was in pain and just wanted to sit down for a bit.) No food available anywhere. Second mistake: forgetting that the French are inflexible about their lunch time. If you don't eat between noon and 2, you're out of luck. Sadly, they are not as rigorous about returning to work as they are about enforcing dining times, because by 2:15 the vigneron's office for Au Clos Napoleon was still closed. Hungry, angry at myself for not planning better and in increasing pain, we called quits on Fixin and headed towards Beaune, looking for other food options. Of which, in that whole 18 mile stretch, we saw none.

Ironically, we were saved by another memory from that 2013 trip. There'd been a McDonalds by the Mercure where we'd stayed. Yes, on the day I'd been anticipating a long, lingering Burgundian blow-out, I lunched at McDonalds. But not, I admit, McDonalds as we know it. This one had table service and a menu de chevre. I think the franchise around the world would benefit from goat's cheese salads and wraps.

So what had we been doing that saw us turning up so late in Fixin? We'd spent the morning at the Cassisium in Nuits-Saint-Georges. A sister facility to the Imaginarium wine experience we'd so enjoyed last time (more here), this modern, hands-on museum tells the story of one of Burgundy's other great products: cassis. Turns out that back in the 19th century, before demand for Burgundian reds became so great that every inch of arable land was given over to vines, Burgundy produced almost as many black currants as grapes. Black currants and Pinot Noir flourish in the same conditions. And though there are records of the fruit being used for cordials and medicines back to the Middle Ages, it wasn't until the late 19th century that the industry took off. Knocking back boozy fruit distillations became incredibly popular with fashionable types who liked to hang at the Moulin Rouge and buy Monets, and Burgundy's sweet yet alcoholic Creme de Cassis was a favourite. The Mayor of Dijon, one Canon Kir, created a cocktail by mixing it with local white wine and serving it at all government functions. The rest, as they say, is history.

As the Imaginarium does with wine, the Cassissium mixes sights, smells, films and games to take you through the history of the drink, then lands you in a tasting room to sample. Védrenne is the company behind the museum, producing more than fifty different crèmes, liqueurs and syrups as well as regular and super-concentrated Cassis. You can sample them all here, although sugar content will kill your palate after about six and too much enthusiasm could land you in a diabetic coma. Suffice to say, if you appreciate the mixology behind a good cocktail, this place is a playground. 

And so we played. And bought. And then we wandered over to the tasting room at the Imaginarium. And got into some interesting conversations with the staff about the French buying Californian vineyards. And then we discovered a Burgundian sparkling red. And suddenly is was 1:20, and we really needed to get to lunch, and then we parked in the wrong place, and then I fell, and then ... there was no room at the Clos.

Oh, well. There are no bad times, only good stories. If I had it to do over again, I would have made a reservation and watched the clock. Or, maybe, I would forget the whole idea of recapturing Fixin and would have investigated Brouilly instead.

Now a familiar bolthole, Annecy provides a lazy break

My mother used childhood holidays to bake a compulsive need for sightseeing into my soul. As much as it contributes to this blog, that need also, admittedly, challenges the ability to have a properly relaxing holiday. Unless I’m somewhere with absolutely no cultural or geological merit … or in a place I’m so familiar with that I’ve already covered most of Trip Advisor’s Top 10 … the call to explore always triumphs over the need to rest.

Lake Annecy in the French Alps now fits into that second exception. Thanks to frequent visits to dear friends who’ve lived here for six years, I can now retreat to this beautiful part of the world for pure R&R. Sleeping in instead of clambering around local castles. Reading on the patio rather than poking about Annecy’s historic streets. Helping my godson with his homework rather than discovering Alpine villages. Nipping down to the local SuperU for groceries and dining in rather than checking out local restaurants. Lolling on the local beach rather than feeding the brain. And thus went much of our recent summer holiday.

That’s not to say we restricted ourselves to our holiday home. Just that I felt no burning need to go out. Instead, I worked in the occasional outing, usually for a few hours in the afternoon, guided by tips from locals rather than the tyranny of lists. (One imagines this is how other people might approach holidays all the time…)

A more leisurely observation reveals that the variety of life in this valley is impressive. The tourist appeal is obvious: spectacular scenery, charming city, historic sights. The range of outdoor pursuits makes it a mecca for adrenaline junkies; paragliders flock over the valley like starlings. An enormous expat community, linked to Geneva but seeking a more reasonable cost of living here, ensures a sophisticated level of shops and services in villages that appear charmingly rural. (Only the broadband speeds, sadly, match the antiquity of the views.) More surprising, perhaps, is a backbone of heavy industry. Pretty Alpine streams can drive machinery as well as tourism. Turns out these mountains were busy in the industrial revolution. Ugine, at the eastern end of the lake’s valley, is still a big producer of specialist steel.

LAND OF MILK AND HONEY
Older industries here are indisputably more picturesque. The mother of them all is dairy. Our first Sunday coincided with the St. Jorioz village fair. Despite all the corporate and industrial influences in the valley, this was profoundly and joyfully agricultural. Fresh-picked apples went into an old-fashioned press and in to bottles for sale. Local game had been transformed into terrines. Step up to the honey stand and taste the terroir of four seasons: obviously, bees are visiting different flowers in each, and the taste of their output varies dramatically. There’s a petting zoo to visit the full range of farm animals, including some particularly handsome geese.

But it’s the milk producers … cows and goats … who take centre stage. In a world of extremes, where lush, green summers flip into long, snow-bound winters, turning milk into preservable food allowed survival. Centuries of necessity later, this region is a cheese-lover’s heaven. In the cow competition that is the climax of the village festival, it is not just about beauty; each animal is evaluated on how many litres of milk, and thus wheels of reblochon, she produced over a year. While the cows work on the rich grasses of the mountain valleys, goats clamber at higher elevations and eat scrub, meaning there's probably even more goats' cheese here than cow.

The Tomme & Beaufort shop in Sevrier is the place to get down to some serious cheese shopping. Run by the local milk and cheese cooperative, this is a temple to local produce. Giant wheels of Beaufort are the first thing you see, arranged as if on a celebratory altar. This firm cow's cheese tastes different depending on what season the milk came from and how long it's been aged. Summer cheese is milder and sweeter, reflecting the sweet grass the cows ate to make it. The sharper, and almost nutty winter, cheese draws its taste from hay. You can sample various wheels before making your choice and watching a fascinating cheese guillotine slice your portion.

Beaufort is delicious on its own but is also typically melted with white wine to make the local fondue. Wheels of soft Reblochon are the centrepiece of another local classic, tartiflette. (Imagine macaroni and cheese, but with potato rather than pasta.) Giant slabs of Emmental also await the guillotine, straw yellow and strewn with holes. There's a whole case of different Tommes, softer and more aromatic, this mountain cheese can be made from cow, goat or ewe's milk. Beyond that, there's another case just for the range of local goats' cheeses.

And you've barely started. Because this little shop celebrates all kinds of local produce. So there's also a fantastic meat counter, stocked with everything from the veal that's a byproduct of the dairy industry to wild boar hunted from the mountain slopes. Another counter offers a range of cured meats and sausages. Terrines and other preserved foods stand in jars next to local honeys, fruit liquors and syrups. And then there's the local wine and beer and, if you're particularly brave, the local spirit known as genepi, which is a distillation of wormwood.

Some basic French is useful here; this isn't a touristy place. Patience is also required if you're here on a weekend or after work, when locals are all coming in to buy this essential part of the Alpine diet. You may queue for half an hour, but watching the cheese guillotine do its stuff will entertain you.

WORKING OFF THE FAT
The region's carb- and cheese-heavy cuisine originated to fuel tough, physically-active mountain people. It is not, admittedly, a good match with a lethargic holiday. So even if I didn't need to see the sights, basic prudence demanded I get up from the garden furniture occasionally.

Our most physically rigorous excursion was a climb up up La Montagne du Taillefer. For the outdoorsy types and adrenaline junkies who holiday in this valley, Taillefer is hardly worth notice. The sign for the first part of the route says the walk from the car park in Duingt to the summit takes 25 minutes. I took more than double that, and was labouring near the top, but I'm proof that it is a route that can be conquered and enjoyed by the less active. You just need to take your time and be very careful on large parts of the route where ridges of bare stone erupt from the path. My hiking pole was essential for balance.

We started with the more direct ascent, closer to the lake, where a paved path rises in switchback curves dotted with shrines illustrating the Way of the Cross. (You're in a Catholic country, after all.) This bit ends at a bench about half way up the mountain overlooked by a large statue of St. Michael triumphing over a devil. Less ambitious hikers should admire the view and go no further.

There's no paved path after this and there are bits where scrambling over rocks can be a bit precarious, but it's all perfectly manageable if you take your time. There are rest points on the way up to admire the steadily improving view. Finally, you come out onto a small Alpine meadow with an astonishing vista of all of Lake Annecy and the mountains around it. The lake narrows to a pinch point at Duingt, with Taillefer forming a land barrier between two almost-separate valleys. Lake Annecy is ringed with higher viewpoints than this 765-meter summit (345 meters, or the equivalent of an 80-story building, from where you started), but none of the higher peaks puts you in the exact centre of the picture. You can return the way you came, or do a longer circle route. We followed the spine of the mountain away from the lake catching glimpses of villages, Alpine valleys and grazing cows below. The descent is heavily forested; the last half mile through a steep, quiet wood full of lofty pines is magical.

There's climbing to be had at the Chateau de Menthon as well, though it's medieval steps rather than mountain spines that will be taxing your energy. Having written about the ancestral home of St. Bernard here before, I won't go into detail beyond saying it was well worth a return visit. Even if the tours are only in French. This is one of a handful of buildings that claim to be the inspiration for Disney's iconic castle, and its exquisite cluster of towers makes that credible. Inside you'll find a warren of rooms both charming and fascinating, as only a home occupied by the same family for more than 1,000 years can be.

Another day we opted for more sophisticated pleasures in Megève. This legendary ski resort is about a 40-minute drive from St. Jorioz. In a few months it will be heaving with the rich and famous but at the moment, caught between school holidays and winter, it's almost empty and most of its luxury goods shops were closed. Though window displays were already well stocked with obscenely expensive apres ski clothes. Without shop attendants, we were spared the temptation of spending more than €1000 on cashmere pajamas or fine knit loden-style cardigans. Most of the people working here at the moment are in the construction trade, breaking the almost-eerie silence in the streets with the din of power tools as every landlord packed necessary renovations into the off season.

I suspect I enjoyed the town more as an empty stage set than I would once populated. The architecture is lovely (yet another village in the Disney Fantasy Land template), the window boxes and planters cascading with late summer abundance, streams gurgling through town beneath quaint bridges, green mountain slopes rising behind every view. We ate lunch at Le Prieure on the main square, where we enjoyed the marvellous views and the upscale ski lodge interior but had one of the worst meals of our trip. Dry, crunchy and almost flavourless risotto was only saved by a decadent chocolate cake. I wasn't expecting value for money in such a place, so wasn't disappointed.

The best part of this day was actually the drive between Lake Annecy and Megève. The route goes through a narrow mountain pass with a few miles of it winding crazily at the bottom of steep canyons of stone. A small river gushes below you, first on one side and then on the other as the road keeps crossing the water in tight bends. It's not for the faint-hearted driver, but will amply reward anyone who enjoys a challenge behind the wheel.

Aix-les-Bains is a much easier drive (mostly motorway) in the other direction. Its legendary hot thermal baths would have slotted nicely into our general theme of indolence, But this holiday ... like all we take to France ... had another theme. We were in Aix for wine.

BOUTIQUE BOTTLES
Domaine Xavier Jacqueline is the kind of tiny, family-run winery you're unlikely to find without local knowledge. They do little marketing, produce small quantities, keep all but the picking between Xavier and his two daughters, and their winery is in an unremarkable bit of suburban Aix far from their fields on hills above Lake Bourget. It's become one of our host's favourites in the region, and he now has the kind of relationship with the Jacquelines that meant the family slotted us in for a tasting despite being deep in the harvest.

Having run through their whole range on a visit last May, this meant we had the delight of comparing 2017s to the 2016s we'd already samples. Their limited run of Pinot Noir was sold out but we tasted the local red Mondeuse, though earlier purchases left no room for acquiring reds. We were here for their sparkling wine, made from a mixture of their white varieties: Chardonnay, Roussette and Malvoisie. We also picked up a case of their premium Chardonnay, part-aged in steel before being finished for a year in wood. It's all the more special because it's called Le Jardin du Mathilde, hand-crafted by his eldest daughter (and the lady who's taken us through both of our tastings) from the plot papa gave her to play with when she first expressed interest in joining him. Both wines and daughter have matured delightfully. We paid inside the production facility, where the whole family was processing the harvest of the previous day. I've spoken to plenty of wine makers before, but it's the first time I've ever been offered a glass of freshly-pressed juice right out of the fermenting vat. Heaven.

As the week ended we celebrated the intersection of our holiday, my birthday and the wedding anniversary of both us and our friends with a gourmet meal in  Annecy's old town. As I've written in previous French reports, the award of one Michelin "plate" in France tends to give you a restaurant that would hold a full star in most other countries. So it was with La Ciboulette.

CASUAL FINE DINING
This elegantly-decorated L-shaped restaurant wraps around a stone-flagged patio in the historic district. It was a warm evening, more late summer than early autumn, so their sliding glass walls were open and the place felt almost tropical. Stiff while linens, silver figurines on the table and original art on the walls reminded me a bit of London's Le Gavroche, but the vibe was decidedly more relaxed. Perhaps a bit too laid back, in fact. Having dressed for a big night out, we were all a bit surprised by the jeans, tee-shirts, shorts and flip-flops of some of our fellow diners. At least, I thought, we weren't suffering from the overly-reverential atmosphere that killed the mood for me at America's French Laundry.

No French Laundry-style extortionate pricing here, either. The €65 chef's menu was excellent value: four courses plus amuse bouche, appetiser and petit fours. The first course was either a rather unusual crayfish carpaccio or an earthy pot of new season ceps. Both were delicious. Most of the table opted for veal as a main, with one choosing and acclaiming the turbot. Next, as you would expect in this region, an astonishing and extremely local cheeseboard. I was delighted to be able to assemble a plate of five distinctly-flavoured goats' cheeses ranging from mild to off-the-charts. I like strong cheeses, but one rolled and aged in bitter genepi was a bridge too far for me. The excessive bitterness of that mouthful was soon a memory thanks to a slice of decadent chocolate tart accompanied by tropical fruits and ice cream. Both boys had opted for a far more sophisticated-looking raspberry and meringue number, the light sharpness of which was probably a better profile to follow cheese, but when have I ever passed up chocolate?

Fortunately for both the budget and the waistline, this big splurge was one of our few nights out in Annecy. Fitting in with the laid-back indolence of the holiday, we cooked a lot of lazy, simple meals at home, though we still took advantage of local ingredients. And lots of the little-known wines of the Haut-Savoie, consumed without restraint as nobody needed to drive home. Laziness has its rewards.

Greenwich's Painted Hall tour is a unique adventure

Lovers of the English language bristle at casual abuse of the word “unique”. An adjective that should be used to describe the exceptionally rare and precious now seems to find its way into marketing copy for everything from laundry detergent to your corner restaurant. “Once in a lifetime” follows not that far behind in casual misuse.

Right now, and for just a few weeks longer, you can have an experience in Greenwich that … quite literally … gives you full rights to use that language. All you need to do is lay out £10, don a high visibility vest and follow your guide up four flights of scaffolding to get within inches of one of England’s greatest works of art.

The painted hall within the Old Royal Naval College is a kind of Georgian Sistine Chapel. Like its Italian cousin, this is one monumental room, painted wall and ceiling by the same artist for demanding patrons with very particular political messages in mind. Michelangelo’s mission was to glorify god. James Thornhill’s to glorify the Hanoverian dynasty, and the Glorious Revolution that preceded them to keep the throne Protestant. With his swirling clouds, cavorting deities, architectural elements and haughty aristocrats, Thornhill is as grandly bombastic as any Italian. In fact, in an era where it was still common to import Italians to paint palatial decorative schemes (witness Antonio Verrio’s Heaven and Hell rooms at Burghley House), Thornhill proved the English could do it for themselves.

The painted hall has always been a major tourist attraction, of course, but you’ve never been able to get this close. (Even if you've never been there, there's a good chance you've seen it on screen as this is a favourite filming location for historical drama.)

Roughly once every 100 to 125 years, the ceiling needs to be cleaned. Now, for only the third time in its history, scaffolding fills the hall so restorers can get at the paintings. And, much like the Sistine Chapel renovation that finished in 1999, Thornhill’s modern restorers are stripping off layers of varnish applied in well-meaning, but ultimately damaging, earlier efforts to reveal the luminous glory of the original colours.

Tours allow you to see the restorers at work and are escorted by a guide who explains both the process of cleaning and what’s going on in the vast series of paintings. One of the most moving sights of the visit is a jar full of discarded, oversized cotton buds that have been used to gently swab the ceiling. They've picked up so much dirt, they look like pieces of charcoal. It's also interesting to see how little fine detail is filled in on the figures. When you're standing far below, the almost-impressionistic flow of colours melds into realistic detail. This close, it's important to have the guide with you to explain what's going on. There's William and Mary, ascending to heaven in a blaze of glory. Above them, Apollo in his sun chariot leads the way. Gods and legends populate the clouds around them. They might have saved Great Britain for the Protestant faith but, ironically, it's a pagan pantheon that sweeps them to heaven.

Prows of massive ships occupy either end of the ceiling, showing off Britain's naval might. The men dining in the hall below, after all, would have been retired Royal Navy seamen. There's even a sprinkling of significant historic figures, and one Naval pensioner painted in to give his colleagues below a sense that everyone was included in this triumph. 

Beyond the Painted Hall, a stroll around Greenwich is always a delight. Just across the grand courtyard from the Hall is the Seamen's Chapel, a miracle of tromp l'oeil painting with a blue-and-white Wedgwood-inspired ceiling. It's one of James "Athenian" Stuart's masterpieces. 

The two magnificent ranges of Georgian architecture that these rooms sit in, facing each other through grand, columned arcades, are arms leading up to the Queen's House. Actually about a century older, this small palace was one of the first Palladian buildings in England. Though started for Anne of Denmark, it's most associated with Queen Henrietta Maria, a woman whose artistic taste was almost as good as her political instincts were bad. (She certainly contributed to the mess that led her husband, Charles I, to execution.) There's little of the original furnishing or decoration inside; the architecture itself, an exquisite circular staircase with sinuous wrought iron foliage and one exuberant Renaissance-style painted ceiling are all Henrietta Maria would recognise.

It's still worth a wander through, however, because the National Maritime Museum has moved some of its best paintings here, and other national collections have lent nautical masterpieces. The freshly-restored Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I is probably the grandest example. The main hall, which long ago lost its original decoration, has been given over to a modern art installation by Richard Wright. Now thousands of 23-carat gold leaf moths flutter over the ceiling and upper walls. It's a bit jarring against the Palladian architecture, but it is beautiful.

Best of all, the Queen's House is now free. Before the renovation, it was under English Heritage's management and had an admission fee. Now it's simply an extension of the excellent, admission-free museum next door.

This is all just the tip of the tourism iceberg in Greenwich. There's the Cutty Sark Museum (another newly-restored attraction), a particularly good artisans' street market, lots of high-end food trucks, the Greenwich Mean Time line, a gorgeous park and the ability to walk under the Thames through a marvel of Victorian engineering. Well worth a day out. 

But if you want a unique, up-close look at the Painted Hall ceiling, you need to get there before the end of September. It's a once-in-a-lifetime chance. Unless you plan to live for at least another century.

Substantial, high-fat Swiss comfort food is crafted for mountain climbing

Four days in Lucerne didn't grant me much insight into a unique regional food culture, or even what qualifies as Swiss. Rather, I came away with the impression that it's much the same as Bavarian food. Whether that's true or not, this is a good place for fans of beer, brezel, schnitzel and the like.

This may, in part, be the fault of us eating at the same place three times over the course of the long weekend. The Rathaus Brauerei occupies the undercroft of the Lucerne's medieval town hall, with an open-sided arcade looking over the river Reuss, the Kapelbrücke and the mountain peaks ringing the lake beyond. If the weather is fine enough, there's a large area for outdoor dining on the riverfront. Even in the rain, well over a hundred people can drink and dine outside but under the arches before heading inside. The enormous size means tables somewhere are generally easy to come by.

This is a microbrewery making a range of its own beers; I happily settled on their seasonal wheat beer on my first visit and didn't waver from that pleasant discovery. The menu is reasonably priced for Lucerne, with main courses ranging from £12 to £24. You'll find a range of hearty soups, wurst, sweet mustard, sauerkraut, meat and cheese plates, sandwiches made with fresh pretzels, etc.

We encountered a similar menu, done to higher quality in a loftier setting atop Mount Pilatus. (See photo above.) Having ascended to the top of an entirely cloud-covered peak, the only logical thing to do at the summit was to enjoy a long, leisurely lunch. The Hotel Pilatus-Kulm has been catering to tourists here since 1890, and thankfully hasn't felt the need to change much. Though recently renovated, the place still feels like a grand, turn-of-the-20th-century hunting lodge, all dark wood panelling, lavish curtains, white linen, grand fireplaces and hunting trophies. The one modern concession in the Cheminée Saal where we ate, was a set of gorgeous blow-ups of photographs of Alpine flowers.

This is the place I discovered the one dish that did seem unique to the area: a barley soup called Bündner Gerstensuppe. I've never had anything like it, but will be trying recipes for it when I get home. While I had it at the Rathaus as well, it was at its best here: a rich broth made from smoked meat and vegetables, thickened with heavy cream and studded with soft, hearty pearl barley. This is the kind of fare you want while clambering around mountains. As in most areas with a big dairy industry, veal is common on all menus here. (You need to do something with those male calves, after all. No point keeping an animal that doesn't produce milk.) The Pilatus-Klum served it as a lightly cooked fillet with a creamy peppercorn sauce, accompanied by crispy fries and a pile of vegetables. Simple food, well done.

Dessert was another introduction to something authentically Swiss: Apfelchuechli. Though I've had plenty of fried apple desserts in Bavaria that are quite similar, this was a new take: whole rings of apple dipped in a donut-style batter and quickly deep fried, sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon and served hot with ice cream.

While the Apfelchuechli and Bündner Gerstensuppe are unique, one similarity to Bavaria rang through. This is not a place for light eating. 

We rolled out the red carpet at the Old Swiss House, one of Lucerne's most historic and established restaurants. I'd read about it, and when we stumbled on its unmistakable exterior ... a free-standing, half-timbered fairy tale house that looks like it served as a model for Disney's Fantasy Land ... after visiting the Löwendenkmal, I thought I'd see if they had a table free. Fate intervened. Not only was there a table, but on our way to it I noticed a prominent Anheuser-Busch logo worked into one of the restaurant's leaded windows. What was this icon of my home town doing decorating a posh restaurant in Lucerne?

Turns out Gussie Busch Jr., who was practically the sainted king of St. Louis when I was a kid, dined here in the '50s and fell in love with the daughter of the owners, one Trudy Buholzer. Their daughter ended up a few years above me at school. Clearly, coming here was pre-destined.

The interior is opulent and charmingly old fashioned. Stained glass, dark woods, flock wallpaper, collections of old silver, oil paintings in gilded frames. Several dishes are finished beside the table with great fanfare. The stairs down to the toilets are lined with photos of famous people who've dined here through the decades. Waitresses wear dirndls, men ties. Prices are commensurate with the atmosphere.

We started with Alpine cheese croquettes. More hearty, deep-fried mountain food ... wicked, delicious peasant fare elevated to haute cuisine with a delicate touch, nice plating and posh surroundings. And then more veal. Wiener schnitzel is the speciality and the Old Swiss House produced the best I've ever had. Probably because of the crazy amount of butter involved. We could study the process as our waitress prepared it in front of us. 

Thinly-pounded veal dipped in egg, then in fine white breadcrumbs. I'd guess 230 grams of butter went into the pan for a single piece of veal. She put the meat in when the butter was melted but not brown, then left it to bubble on a medium heat for about 4 minutes before flipping. When she flipped she also dredged all the eggy clumps of bread crumbs from the tray she'd used to coat the veal, and threw those into the bubbling butter. The fried bits and the now-brown butter became the sauce for an elegantly twirled skewer of fettucini. There were vegetables involved somewhere on the side, but they were clearly an afterthought. 

When it comes to desert, they make a big deal about their chocolate mousse and it is excellent. Quenelled with great fanfare out of a silver dish brought from the kitchen, it's very dark and far less sweet than the usual interpretation. The mound of freshly-whipped mountain cream it comes with is necessary to cut the bitterness; the combination is divine. My father opted for a vodka and prosecco-spiked lemon sherbet, probably a more fitting end to an already rich meal. 

At both the Old Swiss House and the Pilatus-Klum, local white wines were a pleasant surprise. Germanic countries rarely get the attention their wines deserve, and I don't think I've ever seen Swiss wines outside of Switzerland. Perhaps they don't travel well. Or maybe they just want to keep their limited production for themselves. But should you ever see either the Cuvée Hellgelb mix of Müller-Thurgau and Pinot Noir or Schloss Heidegg's Riesling/Sylvaner mix, I can promise you full-bodied, straw-yellow wines with both the richness and acidity to stand up to rich, fried food. 

I've picked out three traditional restaurants here, from moderately priced to special treat territory. But this is by no means the dominant cuisine in Lucerne. Food-wise, this is an international city. My impression was of far more foreign restaurants than Swiss-German. Italian seemed to predominate, from high-end restaurants to snack bars. We spotted American burger joints, international haut cuisine, kebab shops and all variations on Asian. Our other meals featured pizza, an antipasti buffet and sushi. All were fine, but undistinguished from similar fare anywhere else. While I may not have been there long enough to get a full grasp of Swiss cuisine, the local certainly beat out the imports in our explorations.

As long as you're ready to pay for your pleasure, Lucerne is heavenly

Two things are immediately obvious about Lucerne: it is almost impossibly beautiful, and it is breath-takingly expensive.

That's an observation from someone who lives in the orbit of one of the world's most most expensive cities. When London looks like a bargain, you know your credit card is in trouble.

As a basic point of comparison, a 14-piece take-away box of assorted sushi from London's Itsu chain costs £8. In Lucerne, something similar will cost you £28. Our hotel was the most basic I can remember staying in since student trips in the early '80s; that will set you back £130 a night. Transport and admissions are equally pricy. Want to go up the local mountain by cog railway and down by cable car? £75 per person. (For more on that adventure, read this.) A pretty, hour-long boat ride to reach the starting point of that trip? Another £26 each. The cheapest bottle of wine at a local, non-touristy pizzeria is almost £40. And so on. Lucerne is not for the faint hearted or the lightly-funded.

The fact that the whole place is so utterly beguiling gets you past the sticker shock. After a while, you just shrug, enjoy, and accept that you need to pay for your pleasures. It's the deal you have to cut to enter this Alpine utopia.

Mountain lakes have a special kind of beauty. Dramatic peaks ring jewel-toned, crystal-clear water. Cows graze ludicrously green fields. Onion-domed churches and flower-decked, peaked-roof farmhouses dot the slopes.

Lucerne kicks these norms up a notch. The town straddles the Reuss river, which is famously crossed by two medieval wooden bridges. It's framed by a steep hill still crowned by the old city wall and several watch towers Elegant hotels and charming local architecture jostle for riverfront space. Like Bavaria, the indigenous building style favours lavishly-frescoed exterior walls and exuberant iron work for balconies and shop signs. There is modern architecture here. Some of it, like the waterside Cultural Centre near the train station, is strikingly bold. But it's done sparingly and with exceptional good taste.

There's very little industry to cloud the view ... or, indeed, many signs of people living beneath the upper 10%. A boat ride around the lake, which is a must-do for any visitor, reveals an environment so perfectly engineered is seems created by Disney. There are striking homes in a variety of styles: mostly either bel époque, traditional mountain chalet or the kind of sleek modernism found in design magazines. Even the garden allotments look perfect, with all the plants in serried rows, weeds banished and tiny, beautifully maintained little sheds all flying Swiss flags.

There is no rubbish. No graffiti. No potholes in the road. I saw no homeless people. Where do they sweep all the unattractive problems? Are the misfits locked in some chamber beneath a mountain, banished like the children in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? It's a mystery. Truth be told, I think actually living here ... assuming you could afford it ... could feel a bit repressive. But it's an idyllic place to

spend a long weekend.

WALKING TOUR
The greatest joy of Lucerne is to be had by simply walking around. The city is marvellously compact, with all of its main sites being within not much more than a square mile. Playing to this advantage, the city is strewn with benches and outdoor cafes.  The local tourist department produces a booklet with a map of a suggested route that loops the essentials. You can do a comprehensive walking tour in a day, though we broke our exploration into three parts over our long weekend. (Each, unsurprisingly, ending up at the same microbrewery with a magnificent riverside view. Of that, more in the next entry.)

First, wander down the Reuss, taking in the medieval bridges with their striking paintings in the long procession of roof trusses. The Kapelbrücke, closer to the lake and with a sharp change in direction where a stone watch tower breaks its flow, is more famous, but I prefer the Spreuerbrücke with its striking scenes of the Danse Macabre. One assumes privileged Luzerners throughout history have benefitted from the skeletons cavorting with the rich and powerful, reminding them that death comes to us all. In between the two bridges you'll find the Jesuit Church, a particularly bright and cheerful version of Northern Baroque. The ornate plasterwork owes more to Chinese wallpaper than traditional religious iconography: look for peacocks hiding in the curlicues.

The old town on the north side of the Reuss is decorated with a range of painted buildings that elevate the historic centre to an outdoor art gallery. The style and freshness of colour on many of these buildings suggests the painting is from ... or at least, was restored in ... the 20th century, but all the themes conjure old world elegance. Lots of happy hunters and elegantly dressed burgers and their ladies feasting amidst wreaths of Renaissance-style foliage and flying putti. Cobbled lanes open into picturesque little squares decorated with fountains ornamented with statues. Knights, their ladies and fairy tale figures spout water, their features painted and gilded as if the craftsman just stepped away from his creation.

On another expedition, we climbed up through quiet, leafy residential streets to the line of medieval walls. You can keep climbing up several different towers: we chose the Männliturm for astonishing views. You can supposedly see 74 different Alpine peaks from up here. and you get an up-close view of the eponymous "little man", actually a towering knight holding a pennant who watches over the city.

Back down at the lake level, a promenade along the northern side of the waterfront beyond the mouth of the river reveals another kind of town. This is all 19th century: like Cannes, a town built for well-heeled tourists. Grand hotels look over a tree-lined boulevard to a wide promenade dotted with fanciful light posts and a grand band shell. The opulent architecture of the waterfront hides a modern section of the town that is perhaps Lucerne's least charming, but it's there you'll find its most iconic image.

An enormous, weeping lion (the Löwendenkmal) is carved into a rock face above a still pool. Two centuries of visitors, including famous American author Mark Twain, have written about the sculpture's ability to stir emotion. It commemorates a slaughter of Swiss Guards who died defending the French king during the revolution. The sculptor is Bertel Thorvaldson, the Danish master who's known as the Northern Canova. (It was like stumbling on an old friend; one of Piers' cousins is a curator at Thorvaldson's museum in Copenhagen. Read about it here.) This would be a remarkably peaceful place if it weren't for the bus tours that disgorge scores of visitors every few minutes. Grab a bench and wait. Few of them linger for much longer than it takes to snap a few selfies in front of the grieving feline. If you can hit a window in between groups, this is a zen-like place of soul soothing.

AT HOME WITH WAGNER
Beyond the walking tour route is one more sight that will be of interest only to ardent opera fans. Richard Wagner, fleeing from debt and living on the largess of fans with Swiss properties, spent some of his most productive years in Switzerland. He lived in a gracious villa on Lake Lucerne that sits on a small promontory with a magnificent sweep of lawns leading down to the lake. Here, while composing the foundations of his Ring cycle, he also hosted famous visitors like King Ludwig of Bavaria and Frederick Nietzsche.

Today it's a museum, set in a park at the back of a community sports complex out in the suburbs. At £8, admission is cheap for Lucerne, but that's because there's not a great deal here. Besides inspiring views, the ground floor ... which is still decorated in classic 19th century style ... has a collection of portraits and some cases showing off Wagner memorabilia. There are musical scores, personal correspondence and personal effects like his trademark hat and velvet jacket. I was most interested in photos and promotional posters from early productions of The Ring, revealing effete Siegfrieds and beefy Brunhildes in heavy medieval costume. How times have changed!

By the time you get upstairs they've run out of artefacts, so this floor has videos and a temporary exhibit. You can watch videos on Wagner's life and extracts of live performances. There's currently a show on a comic book about Wagner's life. How it came about from concept through production, with lots of commentary from the illustrator on the choices made for drawing style. It's fair to say the appeal is fairly limited. I did enjoy, however, their attempt at hands-on participation. You can sit down and try your hand at some cartooning, following boards with step-by-step instructions, while listening to a Wagner playlist.

On the day of our visit, admission also included a piano recital. Unfortunately, the lady who sold us the tickets forgot to mention that it would be preceded by a 45-minute lecture in German, and that there would be no Wagner on the programme.

I shouldn't have been surprised. In Lucerne, you pay for your pleasure, one way or another.

A spectacular mountain ascent looms over the home of my Swiss ancestors

We've always known the starting points of my American immigrant ancestors' journeys. But identifying a point on a map from understanding a place.

As I've traveled more in Europe, I've gotten a sense of these places of origin. For a person who's had an affinity, and longing, for the sea all my life, it's ironic that my four ancestor famies all came from landlocked bits of their nations. Even more surprising is that two turn out to be proper mountain people. For a child of rivers and plains, who'd hardly ever laid eyes on a mountain until recently, thinking that my DNA springs from such vertiginous landscapes is a stretch. And yet, that's reality.

Last weekend I traveled to Alpnach, the small village outside of Lucerne from which my paternal grandfather's family came, on a journey of discovery with my father. It was the first time anyone from our line of the family had been back.  Taking in the glorious view before us, I wondered if those immigrants were at all disappointed with the comparatively placid landscape of the Missouri and Mississippi river valleys. I love my home town, but in visual appeal it pales to insignificance beside this emerald valley encircled by saw-tooth peaks.

I felt a mixture of awe and unease; the strangeness (to me) of mountains always gives me a slight, jittery discomfort. Did Franz Melchior Wallimann felt the same in St. Louis, as he swapped the solid walls of his mountain valley for an indistinct, limitless horizon that landed somewhere beyond the rolling hills and river?

Lacking diaries, we will never know. Nor will we know why he and his family abandoned what appears to have been a stable and prosperous place. They certainly left plenty of people behind, as the family name is all over the modern cemetery and several current businesses. I think we can assume, however, that Alpnach was as boring as it was beautiful. Though the town name appears in documents as early as the 10th century, a walk around the place shows little built before the very late 19th, and probably early 20th, centuries. Only the farmhouses up in the hills give off a sense of real antiquity. I imagine Alpine beauty can pale beside a life of farm labour, limiting social life to your family and never meeting anyone who comes from beyond the valley.

Ironically, everything was changing for Alpnach right about the time our family left. The Romantic movement had taken Europe by storm, giving the educated classes a new taste for dramatic landscapes and the picturesque. Turner had painted his way through the Alps early in the 19th century; a one-man promotional bonanza. Thomas Cook established tours of the country in the 1840s and Queen Victoria spent a season in Lucerne in 1868 trying to shake off the gloom of her widowhood. The 49-year-old royal even ascended 2,128 metre Mount Pilatus by horseback. Well-heeled tourists followed. By 1889 the Swiss had established an engineering marvel to entertain them. The cog railway that ascended at 48% (still a world record) allowed anyone to follow in Victoria's mountain-climbing footsteps. The Mount Pilatus Railway starts in Alpnach.

Who knows? Maybe our Wallemanns were misanthropes who decided to clear out when their valley got too popular. Somewhere along the journey they also left behind the middle "i", starting to use an "e" instead. At the Alpnach source, everyone is Wallimann.

Alpnach itself is a bit of a misnomer. It's not one place, but a loose string of three villages that fill a bowl-shaped valley with about 6,000 residents. (There were fewer than 1,800 in the valley when the Wallemanns left.) Alpnachstad boasts the Pilatus railway station and the little harbour onto Lake Alpnach, at the end of which, through a narrow channel between mountain slopes, you pass into Lake Lucerne and can travel on to the big city. This is the prettiest bit of Alpnach, where you'll find the greatest concentration of charming Victorian architecture. It presumably sprang up at about the same time as the railway.

Just up the road, in the flat bottom of the valley, is the population centre of Alpnach Dorf, where you'll find the big church (an early 20th century take on Northern Baroque), grocery stores and a handful of restaurants. Grain silos ... one still prominently labeled "Wallimann" ... and lumber yards suggest the region's historic livelihood. A couple of modern hotels catering to hikers and the small airfield that's home to a branch of the Swiss Air Force presumably helps the modern economy. Although from the affluent look of the place I suspect there are plenty of corporate commuters here. Both Alpnachstad and Alpnach Dorf have stations with frequent trains sweeping you to Lucerne in just 20 minutes. A bit further up the valley an outlying cluster of houses around a second, smaller church is called Schoried. Traditional farmhouses of dark wood with peaked roofs and shuttered windows encircle the heights above the trio of villages, looking after herds of cows grazing on rich Alpine grasses. I little river called the Schliere bisects the valley, running down from the mountains to feed the lake. It is a sleepy, pretty, obviously affluent and remarkably quiet place.

The Pilatus Railway remains a major tourist attraction and is the only reason most foreigners travel to Alpnach. It should be on every Lucerne visitors' priority list, but brace yourself for the price. You'll pay about £60 ($78) to go up and down the mountain ... presumably it takes a lot of cash to maintain the precision engineering that gets you up and down ... and another £20 ($26) for the boat ride out from Lucerne. Switzerland is not for the budget traveler. But if you've got the cash and appreciate spectacular views, it's worth every penny.

Though you can zip out to Alpnachstad on the much cheaper (£6, $8) and faster train, the boat is part of the whole experience. Cruisers take off from just outside the central train station regularly and take a zig-zagging meander across Lake Lucerne for an hour. Lucerne itself is magical from any angle, but particularly breathtaking from the water. From the centre of the lake you can better appreciate everything from the towering mountains and imposing monasteries to onion-domed churches and holiday villas. There's a mix of architecture here, from traditional Swiss straight out of the pages of Heidi to classic Edwardian grandeur and a lot of sleek modern stuff. From the water, it looks like everyone here sits comfortably in the world's top 10% of earners.

This is particularly true as you pull up to the dock at Bürgenstock where a sprawl of buildings so cute they could have been designed by Disney fronts a cog railway that whisks visitors to the luxury resort on the cliffs above. It's positioned exactly opposite, though high above, Lucerne, giving spectacular views along with clean mountain air. (Qatari investors recently funded a £400m+ renovation; you can check it out for a starting price of £700 a night.) I recognised those cliffs. Thirty two years before, when I was travelling around Europe after university with $20 of spending money a day and staying in places a good deal more humble, we'd splurged on a dinner cruise that dropped anchor beneath the cliffs. A local, kitted out in leather shorts and boiled wool jacket, let loose on an Alpenhorn and demonstrated the lake's magnificent acoustics. I suspect that memory is worth more than a stay at the Bürgenstock. Not that I'd mind it, if someone else were paying.

Things get a little more "real" as you pass into Lake Alpnach and spot a bit of heavy industry to one side. The gravel pit and quarry implies that someone actually does physical labour here, and might make less than an investment banker. On the other side of the lake, however, are brand new apartments marketing the yacht space below that comes with your new digs.

Its just a short walk from the boat to Pilatus station and, this being Switzerland, it's all perfectly timed so that rail cars are waiting for the boat passengers.

The ascent itself feels like a merger between a lift (elevator) and a train. The cars are built at a steep incline, with each 8-person compartment positioned about four feet below the next. Surprisingly, the operation of the huge metal cogs is almost silent, remarkably smooth and fairly quick. At first, you're beguiled by the houses and the airfield in the valley below dwindling to dollhouse proportions. Then you clear a ridge and the whole sweep of Lake Lucerne opens up beside you. Long views alternate with passages through tunnels hewn from the stone and thick forests. It's a a mix of elm, oak and pine, later only the last. As the trees start to thin, you come into the meadows, where cows go about their milk-making duties and Alpine flowers dot the grasses. The track has curved, so you've now lost Lake Lucerne and are looking down into Alpnach. As you go above the treeline, heather comes to dominate the vegetation, house-sized boulders scatter the landscape and sheer walls of rock rise above you. This is where the incline slopes to its record-breaking 48 percent. It is spectacular, and over far too soon.

On clear days, of course, you can see for miles. We ascended into a cloud. Though the views were good for 90% of the journey, By the end we could only make out things about four feet in front of us. We didn't see the station as much as feel it when the train reached the end of its line.

Up top is a modern concrete and glass visitor centre with terraces, cafe and gift shop. There are walks across the peaks for hikers, though only an idiot would have ventured onto them with the visibility we had. There are also two hotels, and it's to one of these that we retired for a leisurely lunch in the clouds.

The Hotel Pilatus Klum opened a year after the railway and saw a full restoration in 2010 to bring it back to its original Victorian splendor. It's a classic aristocratic hunting lodge: hard woods, glazed tiles, enormous fireplaces, lots of antlers. The total lack of view gave us a chance to focus fully on a magnificent lunch, which was firmly drawn from local tradition and served by a strapping, rosy-cheeked lad who looked like he could easily chop down a few trees and haul some cows over mountain passes as soon as he finished with the easier business of giving us our lunch. (For more on the food, see my restaurant review coming soon.)

You have a choice on your descent: back down the cog rail or transfer to a cable car. (Or walk, of course. You can get off at multiple stops on the way up or down for Alpine strolls.) We switched to the cable car, which brings you down the other side of the mountains into the suburbs of Lucerne, making for a pleasant round trip. Our first few minutes started in cloud so thick you'd be terrified if a plane attempted to take off or land in it. We could see one or two metres of cable, then nothing. Then, quite suddenly, we emerged from the cloud and the whole valley of Lucerne spread below us. This side of the mountain is gentler, more heavily forested and liberally threaded with hiking paths. Half-way down, you reach a station where you switch from the room-sized, large-group car to four-seaters reminiscent of amusement parks of my youth. (Why did Disney take the cable cars out of Fantasy Land?) Had we had more time, this is where I would have happily gotten off and spent an hour walking before continuing down the mountain. But the day was getting on and a combination of rich food and white wine was suggesting nap rather than exercise, so we pushed on.

There is, however, a pretty little walk from the cable car terminus in Kriens to the Lucerne bus. It winds down through a residential area, past a pretty church, a traditional farmhouse and barn with dairy fields and a traditional Alpenhorn workshop whose proprietor, sadly, was already enjoying his Saturday afternoon so we could only admire through the window. Back on the flat, you emerge onto a main street just up from the bus stop. All of which was clearly signposted from the terminus,  with classic Swiss organisation. The No. 1 whisks you back to Lucerne central station in about 15 minutes.

We'll never know how many of our ancestors wandered that mountainside, but it's a safe bet they did. Who knows. Maybe Franz Melchior followed his herds up to the plateau that would become the Hotel Pilatus-Klum. Maybe he looked down on the spectacular, but then nearly-empty Alpnach valley and thought he needed to get out of the most boring place in the world. Sadly, the one thing we know he did not do was think to invest in the cog railway, the steamer line that brought tourists to it or a posh little hotel on the summit. Had he done that, we might have been enjoying the profits of the day rather than spending a fortune to enjoy it.

I forgive you, great-grandfather Franz. At least you gave me an excuse for a spectacular day out with your grandson.

Ickworth, Wimpole show off East Anglia's country house glories

Had life taken just a few turns differently, I might have settled in East Anglia.

My first tentative steps into English life, rather than tourism, happened there. My American employer had a subsidiary in Cambridge, and I managed to plead my way into two week-long assignments there following British holidays in the early '90s. Had they, rather than the London HQ, had longer-term roles, I would have happily started my expat life there. At about the same time I was getting to know my first British office, the man who would become my husband had inherited a quarter share of a farm in Norfolk. Reality called him to London as well, and the family sold up, though a drive by the old place this past weekend did trigger fantasies of me, freelancing after a career of tech marketing in Cambridge, married to a blackcurrant farmer and producing my line of boutique prosciutto from heritage-breed pigs. It could have happened...

Instead, this area is mostly a vivid memory imprinted by the typical, high-intensity explorer mode of my youth. I packed more tourism into the four weekends and 10 weeknights around those Cambridge business trips than most people do in years. What I found was quite possibly England's most densely-packed region for country houses, cathedrals and charming villages. While residents of the Cotswolds, Dartmoor or the Lake District might sneer at the flat landscape, the fens have a moody charm and there are some lovely beaches.

And yet, aside from one girls' trip in 2010, I've hardly set foot in the region since moving to England permanently in '99. This is primarily because of how inaccessible it is, thanks to Britain's overstretched transport networks. Though it's only 120 miles from our house to Cambridge, that will take you about four and a half hours if you hit the typical jams on the M4, 25 and 11. (Three on the rare traffic-free run.) Trains are expensive, uncomfortable and demand the hassle of a cross-London transfer. A journey requires a good excuse. And now we have one. A dear friend is about to "marry in" to the county, so we headed to her new village of Great Hockham for a long weekend.

The sightseeing options from here are vast. Bury St. Edmunds ... home and site of the martyrdom of England's original patron saint ... has an atmospheric town centre, a romantic ruined abbey and a modern sculpture trail commemorating Edmund's story. Newmarket is the home of British horse racing. Cambridge, of course, has all the dreaming spires, culture, punting and architecture of Oxford, but is slightly less overrun by tourism. Cromer, the nearest beach town, is famous for its crabs. Duxford offers one of the world's best aerospace museums, which I wrote about here.

On this visit, and having barely used my National Trust membership this year, I opted for countryhouses: Ickworth on the way up, Wimpole Hall on the way back. Both are spectacular examples of late Georgian/Regency style and, I wager, would be far better known if they were easier to get to. Distance does. however, have its advantages. Neither were particularly crowded, even on a weekend at the heart of school summer holidays.

Ickworth is unique for its enormous central rotunda. Intended as an impressive space for entertaining and showing off collections, it was designed by an imported Italian architect and is clearly meant to channel monumental ancient architecture with its ascending orders of columns and Parthenon-style external friezes. The result is a bit ungainly. Out of proportion with the wings on either side of it, the rotunda looks more like a museum or civic building than a gracious country house. But its sheer quirkiness makes it worth a wander.

The entry hall is particularly magnificent, soaring up the full height of the building beneath the dome, the space broken by a series of landings and fly-overs. Not only decorative, the landings along the upper stories are all lined with bookshelves, making the space a rather magnificent multi-story library.  The thing I remembered most from a visit here 20 years ago, however, was the Pompeii room. It's still just as striking, though two more decades of European tourism have given me the perspective to find it just a bit less unique than I thought it was, and in far worse repair than I remembered. Still, it's one of the earliest examples of the fad for copying what archeologists were digging up beneath Vesuvius, and it's gorgeous. I had not remembered the extensive collection of family silver, which is one of the best held by the National Trust.  One of the most amusing things about Ickworth, however, is simply checking out how its decorators worked with the challenge of curved outer walls. In some spaces, like the dining room, it throws proportion off and seems decidedly odd. But it enhances the drawing room to make it a dramatic spectacle.

Most of Ickworth came together during the Regency, that brief but critical inflection point between the Georgians and the Victorians. I adore this style. You have all the scholarly classicism of the Georgians, but it's tempered with a sense of humour and fun. And while it anticipates the lavish use of fabrics and pattern, and random mix of historic styles so beloved of the Victorians, it does it with a much lighter, airier touch. Wimpole Hall is an even better example.

The most memorable interiors here are the work of Sir John Soane, who went on to be one of the go-to architects of the early Victorian age and is now remembered best for his Bank of England building (based on a grand Roman baths complex) and his house-turned-museum. There's a marvellous story of how the owner of Wimpole, while on his Grand Tour, noticed an Englishman obsessively measuring the ruins at Paestum. It was Soane. When it came time for home remodelling a few years later, that sort of attention to detail meant Soane got the call.

Though this is early work, his obsession with domes and arches ... and mixing them up in interesting ways to bring light into a room through innovative sources ... was already in full flow. He created one of my favourite libraries in England here, with a light-filled ante-room under a series of arches, classical motifs in plaster picked out with grey-and-white delicacy. The house is most famous for his T-shaped, yellow drawing room, the odd angles and tall dome of which demanded the destruction of seven rooms to squeeze it into the framework of the old house.

My favourite, however, is his Roman-inspired indoor swimming pool. Visitors came down a circular stair from the bedroom level to enter a small room with a fireplace, towel racks and arched alcoves. From there, two arches open on curved stairs that sweep down, meeting in the middle on a wooden deck surrounding a deep pool. Not big enough for swimming laps, but eight or 10 people could happily take a dip here at once without crowding. Don't forget to shower before entering the pool! It's a Soane-designed piece of furniture: step inside the four wooden columns and beneath the round water tank (mahogany decorated with classical motifs) and pull the chain; water will drain through a lead grill to a pan beneath your feet. I wonder what Victoria and Albert made of it on their visit here. Evidently Soane designed a number of these, but this is the only one left.

Wimpole is more than Soane, however. In the best English country house tradition it shows off layers of design from different eras. The exterior and formal staircase, encrusted with decorative plasterwork on broad cornices, is Carolingian. There's a rare Baroque painted chapel by Thornhill that looks more suited to Hampton Court Palace than a Cambridgeshire country seat. Victorian tiles in ancient Roman style welcome visitors with a big "Salve" laid into the floor.

We can thank Elsie Bambridge for our ability to see any of this. Rudyard Kipling's daughter, and only surviving child, lived here from 1938 to her death in 1976, using royalties from her father's books to restore what was then a crumbling pile. Think of this as the house The Jungle Book built. Bedrooms and several sitting rooms appear as she left them when the place went to the National Trust, capturing the lovely pastiche English country house style of the late 20th century.

Outside there are walks through classic parkland, a dramatic ruined castle (actually a folly built from scratch) to catch the eye, an impressive stable block with cafe and shop, a separate restaurant in the service wing, the parish church and an enormous Victorian walled garden fully restored to grow fruit, vegetables and flowers. The old home farm buildings have been transformed to a model farm and petting zoo for kids; I didn't get that far but the flow of happy children walking back from that direction suggests it's probably a bigger draw than Soanian architecture.

Wimpole and Ickworth are just the tip of the country house iceberg in East Anglia. My introductory blitz in the early '90s gives me fond memories of the Baroque glories of Houghton, the Tudor ghost that is Anne Boleyn's childhood home of Blickling and the fanciful Jacobean skyline of Felbrigg. Holkham, the only house in the county I've visited and written about since starting this blog, is perhaps my favourite house in the country and has the added benefit of one of England's best beaches.

Yes, it's a pain in to get here from Hampshire. But I think I'm very happy that I have friends with a guest room in the region. It's time to get to know it again.