From Louis Agassiz to Jean-Jacques Rousseau

During the last days of August, my wife and I and two other friends went biking in the region of the "Three Lakes" in central Switzerland, situated between the cities of Murten (Morat), Neuchatel and Biel (Bienne). We stayed on the smallest lake of Murten where we found accommodation in Hotel Bel-Air in Praz, which we highly recommend. Praz is a small wine-growing village of the Vully region. On our first day, we took a bike ride through the vineyards and ended up wine-tasting in Môtier, which is the birthplace of Louis Agassiz, a world famous naturalist and "Father of Glaciology". He studied the glaciers in Switzerland and discovered in 1840 that a great "Ice Age" had once covered most of the earth. He became professor at Harvard in 1848 and was a founding member of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States, but also a lifelong opponent of Darwin's theory of evolution! We were surprised by the quality of the bicycle paths, when we took off the next day to visit an island in the lake of Bienne. The trail markers were excellent and ever-present-bright-red road signs with a pale-blue square that displayed the route number in white. Rarely were we on a road with automobiles. It was extremely difficult to get lost, although we did manage to do so once or twice. We arrived at the Island of St-Pierre in the early afternoon and had lunch at the castle. Jean-Jacques Rousseau found refuge here from Geneva in the autumn of 1765. He was captivated by the simplicity and the charm of the place. He spent six weeks on this Island, "the most beautiful of my life", he declared. Unfortunately the Bernese authorities considered the stay dangerous and issued a command of expulsion.
Now the Island St-Pierre is known worldwide. The chateau is owned by the Hess foundation in Napa Valley. The lunch was excellent and the "Pinot Noir" from the island great. We biked back to our hotel after a visit to the beautiful medieval city of Erlang, changing our tongue back to french somewhere in the countryside.