Welcome to your cozy hotel room in Switzerland.  100 Swiss Francs gets you a room that's 24 square feet and will almost allow you to stand up straight!  You have your own bathroom in your room, the gutter leads directly outside.  Wake-up service and shower are combined into one!  Cold water will be poured through a hole in the roof promptly at 6 am everyday!  Enjoy your stay!

Randy Nufer gets comfortable in our hotel room in Colombier, Switzerland.  Built in the 14th century this room continually housed Switzerland's favorite sons within a fortified tower that contains no windows.  The unique pleasure of having criminal amounts of fun in Switzerland can be yours if you're one of the lucky ones the Swiss government chooses to 'rent' this cozy efficiency room to!  Best ways to assure your name is at the top of their list:  1) tell them California cheese is better than theirs, 2) try to sell Hershey's chocolate on the underground black market, 3) go cow tipping in the countryside, 4) be a vegetarian, or 5) speak fewer than 3 languages.  (For Americans this is the easiest way).  

Seriously though, this is the Hotel we stayed at in Colombier, just 10 minutes outside Neuchatel, and it only cost $17 a night per person which included breakfast!

There's a reason the Swiss don't really want to go with war with or for anyone.  With barracks like these at the Auvernier Arsenal, just outside Neuchatel, there's really no reason to want anyone else's stuff.  Some of the walls of this building date back to Roman times.

Your Swiss Army Knife will come in handy for pruning the rose bushes outside of the mess hall.

Neuchatel is a lake side town.  Against better judgment, we spent an hour among 3 to 4 foot swells in a 16 foot motor boat.  This is the only picture I took before I decided that staying in the boat was more important than taking pictures from it.

In the above picture directly above the first "directly" in this sentence, you can see two spires from the Neuchatel Chateau Collegiale Church.  Construction of this church began in 1185 with many additions throughout the ages.  Just below the church you can see the prison tower.  Take a closer look at the church and the prison tower.

Here are some pictures of and from the prison tower of the Chateau complex.  When originally built, this building was directly on the lake shore.  But not to be outdone by their Dutch counterparts in the art of land reclamation, the Swiss successfully pushed the lake back about 150 m.

The last building at the Chateau complex is the Chateau itself.  It is now the seat of the Neuchatel government and is where the "Welcome to Switzerland" mural is from.  Below is a close-up of the restored artwork in one of the large meeting rooms of the Chateau.

The walls of this room are completely covered with the coats of arms of all the rulers of Neuchatel dating back to the 13th century.