Saint-Ursanne

I'm skipping Biel, where I spent three days doing a circle training with the Swiss Restorative Justice Forum, because I have neither interesting pictures of it nor anything particularly deep to say about it at this time. For now it's just a planted seed. 

So: on to *my* mother's visit. She also came for two weeks, and we took two trips together, the first one with Caroline to Saint-Ursanne. On my trip to this fairytale town three years ago I spotted, through a low window in the closter, this charming weaving studio. And my mom owns a loom, inherited from her aunt, who in turn got it from her uncle, who manufactured looms in the basement of my great-grandparents' house in Seattle (truly a thing - here's someone's random blog post about them!). So my plan was: use the fairytale town as a base to visit other locations in the fairytale Swiss Jura region and treat my loom-owning mother and my crafty daughter to a weaving class. This plan was half successful. It turns out that Saint-Ursanne is...maybe not experiencing its best years. In particular it lacks regular bus service back up the hill to the train station, so once we got down there we were kind of stuck, with precious little to do except take long walks, which my mom's hip was not up for. But the bits of the town that were open were still charming, and the weaving class was awesome. Friendly, accessible, beautiful materials, therapeutic activity...of course Caroline took to it the fastest but even my mom and I got some lovely tea towels out of it. Five stars.

On the way there my mom and I made a pilgrimage to the Camille Bloch (no relation, unfortunately) Discovery World in Courtelary. Chocolate tasting, always good! 

Saint-Ursanne, not as public-transit-friendly as it could be but still very much a fairytale village.

We stayed at the rather-strangely-medieval-themed Peanut Lodge, which featured things like motion-activated jungle sounds in the hallway and peanut-shaped butter balls at breakfast. Why they didn't keep the name "Hôtel du Boeuf" is beyond me, who wouldn't want to stay there?

Caroline, rocking the loom.

Supplies, and tea time.

The fruits of our labors.