Ballenberg - Fireworks - Helicopters

The kids are on summer break and it is Swiss National Day so we have a 3 day weekend.
Sunday we went to Ballenberg. It is an open air museum where the Swiss have taken various buildings from throughout the country and rebuilt them in a HUGE museum. We made it through maybe 1/3 of the place.

The place is quite impressive. The oldest building we were in was from the Italian region of Switzerland and dates from 1515. Almost 500 years old! The above photos were from a traditional Swiss Chalet. It was fairly new, it was barely 150 years old.

If anyone does actually come to visit, this is something we will probably do.


Today is Swiss National Day, basically 4th of July Swiss style. In our continuing quest to integrate into the culture, we have purcahsed our share of celebratory explosives. This has nothing to do with the fact that the kids and I like to blow things up and is simply about cultural acceptance. We are heading over to a friends to grill and hopefully watch/launch fireworks later today.

And finally, our last adventure for the weekend. Xavier bought a remote control helicopter. On day three of owership the kids managed to put it on the roof of a neighboring apartment building. We knew the school had some ladders around so Kim and I spent about an hour figuring out how to reassemble them into an extension ladder. We carried the two 20 ft sections of ladder down to the apartment. Unfortunately the catch for the ladder was broken so we had to extend the ladder on the ground. To make a long story short, Kim is not strong/heavy enough to hold a 30 aluminum ladder on the ground while putting up or taking it down. The helicopter was rescued in the end and luckily on slight injuries were incurred.