Phew! After moving to Switzerland, traveling back to the US to get my travel documents sorted, picking up the final dog to complete our household and a host of other things, I am finally caught up. This is why there will be a small avalanche of posts: weeks 33 through 37 will pour like lava from an erupting volcano (or like fondue from a toppled pan) onto these blog pages today and the only thing left to do for the week is to talk about my new cheese of the week which will come from Austria or Germany. That’s right, I am doing another one of those cheese cage matches, where two cheeses fight to the death for that prized title of Cheese of the Week.

In the meantime, I still have a lot of catch-up posts that will be released on a regular basis, one after another, until all of the Cheeses of the Week have been accounted for. The above picture is one I would like to dedicate to my family. While the biggest burden of the 52 cheeses project falls on my shoulder, they too pitch in where they can to lighten my load as I eat my way to the finish line, only 14 more cheeses away.

Look forward in this place and on Our Swiss Life for dueling accounts of this weekend’s adventure: the Désalpe in St. Cergue, Vaud, Switzerland, an all-cow extravaganza that features more cowbell than even Bruce Dickinson would care for, alpenmacaroni in ridiculously large pans and all manner of other things we look forward to, based on our first cow encounter of the third kind, a lifetime ago.