That rocketship looking thing was at the top of the mountain. In order to get to the top we had to take a gondola up the mountain and then crowded into an elevator that went up through the middle of the rock. Finally, after walking through some more hallways, we emerged into blue sky and an incredible view.
Here
is a view of Switzerland. We could also see the Italian and French Alps
from this lookout. A bit to the left of this picture we could see the
place where Dad and I had gone backpacking and it was pretty cool to see
the whole mountain that we'd climbed over from above.
The
guy in the white shirt is my dad. He's looking at Mont Blanc. I always
love this picture because it looks like he's communing with the mountain
-- like he wishes he could take it home with him.
When
we got up top we discovered that there was a very long line to come back
down again so we were stuck up there for a few hours (causing my dad to
miss a lot of the Tour de France stage that day - c'est dommage!). While
we were sitting around in the sun a big cloud suddenly came up from below
us and swallowed the top of the mountain. Fortunately we had already had
our fill of views before the cloud came, but you can see it creeping up
behind me and my dad in this picture.