Ken Ritley

Continuing the series, a familiar sight to anyone who visits the cheese factory in Gruyères – but probably not well known outside of that.  Cheese is produced in an ongoing process, in which the day’s shipment of milk is processed into “wheels.” The wheels are are stored very neatly in a climate controlled warehouse the size of a football field.

And a robot, shown here in the center, attends to their daily needs, flipping each wheel over on its face, dusting off the surface, and – unless I miss my guess – spraying it with a light saline solution.

This is a snap from arguably the most important of all passes through the Swiss Alps, the Gotthard Pass:

Again, since I never re-touch or edit my snaps in any way- what you see is what I got! – this has to be one of my favorites, with the intense green contrasting a very thin white band of atmosphere just above the horizon.

Although you can see it here, several hundred feet below the ground is an Autobahn tunnel, that I mentioned in a recent blog post.

If you are interested and get the chance, there is a fabulous historical movie that depicts the tunnel building efforts. It’s fascinating because it addresses things you might think about (the horse caravan industry that transported goods across the Gotthard Pass in the summer was threatened existentially) and things you might not (huge problems with disease, simply because the long tunnel and sanitary conditions at the time did not permit the transport of human waste out of the tunnel).

By no means an uncommon sight in Switzerland, and known as a purple heron, or Ardea purpurea. I spotted this one resting on a boat in Lake Zurich:

This is Ansel Adams, who everyone knows is the most famous photographic artist since the camera was first invented:

Interestingly, at least according to what I read, he never identified himself as a photographer, but rather as “an artist that used the medium of photography.”

And this is one of his masterpieces, the church at Bodega Bay:

Well, now it’s my turn!

Recently, at about the midpoint of my daily morning 15km Nordic walk, I captured what I thought was a magnificent snap of a church in Winterthur, basking in the early morning sunlight:

This snap has not been retouched or enhanced in any way.  It’s snaps like this – fresh out of my little point-and-shoot camera – that really keep me going!

This is a snap of some houses outside of the medieval village of Gruyères:

The “s” at the end always confused me, so I finally looked it up. The village is named Gruyères, with an “s.” But it is located in a district called La Gruyère, no “s” in the Swiss canton of Freibourg.

The snow covered peak in the background is La Moléson, sort of a mini version of the more famous Matterhorn, reaching just over 2000 meters in height.

It looks like I’ve climbed down between the railway tracks to take this stunning shot of the railway station at Olten, in Switzerland, meaning there would be mere seconds before a ultra high speed train crashed into me:

Allemanic is the more evolved form of High German spoken in Southern Germany and Switzerland, and many people consider Olten to lie on a language boundary that separates the Zürich form of Allemanic from the Bern form.

Funny story – but true: there is a train conductor for the Swiss Federal Railways that has the route from Zurich to Geneva. Between Zurich and Olten he greets the passengers with the Züridüütsch greeting “Grüezi wohl.” Between Olten and Freibug he switches dialects and greets the passengers with the Bäärndüütsch greeting “Grüessech wohl.” And between Freiburg und Geneva he switches languages completely and speaks French, “Bonjour Madams, Monsieurs.”

A mathematician would say it like this: If C is the set of all good cows, and B is the set of all bad photographs, then the intersection of C and B is the empty set.  But it is easier to just look and see, as I tried to catch the combined emotions of satisfaction and self-indulgence in this cow, just freshening up after a busy day of chomping on fresh, Gruyères grass shows:

Switzerland is the land of cheese – well, it is the land of plenty more things than just cheese, too, but you have to give the Swiss a lot of credit for their cheese. And to take a lot of credit for their cheese, they need a lot of cows. And to keep a lot of cows well fed in the winter, they need a lot of grass.

So sights like this are a common one all over Switzerland in the warm summer months, as the farmers ensure their clipped grass dries thoroughly in the sun:

Tractors themselves are amazing, amazing things, and there are literally hundreds of different attachments that farmers can buy. Because I lived for nearly a decade in America’s farm land, I knew many farmers and I got to know a thing or two about tractors: this tractor above is pulling a so-called rotary rake. I’m afraid I don’t know what it’s called in German.

It is a physical impossibility to capture a bad photograph of a genuinely good cow, as this snap of many cows relaxing in the Swiss Gruyères countryside shows. They are very content in the knowledge that although their babies may now be Züri Geschnetzeltes, soon their milk will Switzerland’s most famous brand of cheese: