Rebecca and I flew to London on June 28, 2018, joining a Naturetrek tour focused on the butterflies of the Swiss Alps from July 1-8 before heading for home on July 9. Two enjoyable and full days in London staying at the Delmere Hotel in Paddington, had us out looking for butterflies in Hyde Park one afternoon and the next day joining a local butterfly group at Stanmore Country Park at the end of the Jubilee tube line. We joined our tour group at Heathrow the next morning for a flight to Zurich and (once we finally made it through Swiss customs) and took a series of three trains to Wengen and the delightful Hotel Berghaus, our base for the week. Each morning, our excellent guide, Jon Stokes, would check the weather forecast to decide where best to go for butterflies that day and then work out all the train and cable car schedules to most efficiently get us there and back. The weather predictions we'd seen in the weeks leading up to the trip had not looked good at all, but turned out much better than expected, with only one full day that butterflies were hiding and generally excellent conditions for most of the time. The group would end up with an excellent tally of nearly 100 butterfly species, way more than I had expected and about half of which I managed to photograph, all but two (Red Admiral and Painted Lady) were new for me. Made it home at the end of that fabulous week riding those trains back to Zurich, flying to Heathrow, overnighting at the airport Hilton, and into Houston, all right on time. Unfortunately, our flight home got cancelled due to mechanical problems until the next day. United Airlines did put us up in a hotel and gave us some food vouchers, but it made for a pretty long day waiting around without our checked luggage - small price to pay for a wonderful trip.

All pictures were taken with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ1000 and post-processed with Adobe Lightroom. This time, I got home with 648 images, which finally got narrowed down to the 141 included here. This first page has pictures of everything but the butterflies, which are shown on the second page.

While I'm fairly certain on most of the identified butterflies, some are likely incorrect, and any corrections or suggestions for changes to any of them would be appreciated.

Click on any of the thumbnails below to see a larger image of any of the pictures in a new window.