Out This Door: Destination Reviews • Hotel Reviews • Itineraries • Travel Tips

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

If you are going to Lausanne, Switzerland for the history and the beauty of the alps, make sure to take a little side trip to Montreux on Lake Geneva to say hi to Freddie Mercury. Bronzed, that is, not in the flesh–Freddie Mercury’s statue.

Get Nikki’s gray coat: This awesome North Face coat is my go-to for temperatures from 20-60f degrees. Warm but not bulky. Doubles as a travel pillow.

1st Half of the Story: Randomly Seeing Freddie Mercury

Going to Montreux, Switzerland from Lausanne was unplanned. Read more in our post Finding a Travel Partner for OTD’s MO on planning and purposefully not planning. But it was a low-stakes exercise in learning how to take the regional train system and would get me to another alp.

When we arrived in Montreux, the train up the alp was in an hour or so, so we stepped out to the Altstadt right near by to take a look around. What sites were here to see? Was it worth spending more time, if we had it, once we came down from the alp back into Montreux.

And yes it was. Montreux had a Christmas Market that we hadn’t known about. Vendors were just getting set up but people had begun to mill through so we did too.

And at the end of the row what to our wandering (wondering?) eyes should randomly appear but Freddie Mercury.

No one quite knows the reason, though local legends abound, as to why a sculptor, who had no connection to the lead singer of the 80’s rock band Queen, chose to erect the statue of Freddie Mercury in Montreux, Switzerland.

Yet there he stands in his circus ringleader’s baroque jacket, so tight over his fit torso that it is not buttoned, fist of triumph high in the air above him while his eyes look at the memories of hordes of fans below him instead gazing longingly at beautiful Lake Geneva just ahead.

Of course, I took a photograph. Keep reading.

2nd Half of the Story: Randomly Seeing Freddie Mercury

Just a few weeks later, CT picks up a pizza at a locally-owned Italian restaurant near our home in AZ. Waiting at the pick up counter, CT found himself close enough to eavesdrop on a random multi-generational family at the nearest table. The matron enthusiastically quizzed her adult children, “Where is this, then? And who?”

They were dumbfounded.

But not CT. He announced the answer as if the question had been directed to him from the start, “Freddie Mercury, Montreux, Switzerland!”

The random traveler with evidence of the wonders (through wandering) that she saw randomly in Switzerland was as dumfounded as her family. Perhaps, this was a perfectly random isolated incident of two travelers who randomly saw the same random statue of Freddie Mercury in Switzerland and then randomly shared the moment later in the same random pizza place in Arizona.

But maybe, this is exactly why we travel.

We are the Champions, my friends!