Yesterday we drove up to Geneva and back, mainly to see some relatives who were passing through. Since we were travelling to Switzerland, which is not part of the European Union, we theoretically needed our passports. In practice the border crossings in the little villages where we went through were completely unmanned. The main border crossing is manned and very busy, but if you go through there you get on the motorway. The Swiss pay a largish annual fee to use their motorways and charge the same to visiting foreigners. We were reluctant to pay this just to travel 12 kilometres into Geneva centre for the only time this year. So we had to take a roundabout route on the backroads.

We spent most of our day chatting over lunch, but we also visited the church in the old town, and climbed the towers. We had a lovely panorama of the lake with its giant fountain.

We also got to see a model of the church and the bells. This one is called Clemence.

Geneva was important in the Reformation, or perhaps conversely, the Reformation was important to Geneva. The main organiser in the city was Calvin, who was French. Strangely, we mostly remember the Reformation in Geneva because Jean-Jacques Rousseau fled from its rigid theocracy (I am quoting the cliché here). Nowadays, we think of Calvin as Swiss and Rousseau as French, though I doubt either would have seen it that way. Our relative was interested in the Reformation, which I had also studied. I was having a hard time remembering any details, but fortunately there were some explanatory posters around.