On Saturday June 18th two of our friends from Minnesota, Tim Gillard and Colleen Crook, flew into Zurich for a see-it-all Swiss vacation. Over six days they made our apartment their base of operations as they ventured out to see Swiss cities, mountains, country side, and lakes, while riding every means of Swiss public transport: from trains, to buses, to boats, and even gondolas. Melissa joined the tour on the weekend when she wasn’t working, and I was able to go with them four out of their six days.
To simplify their journey back to our apartment, Melissa and I rented a car to pick them up from the airport. We picked up the car around 2 p.m. from Lausanne then easily found our way to the freeway that we followed for two and a half hours, all the way to the airport. The car was a 2016 model with all the latest features: back up camera, sensors beeping to tell you if you were going to hit another car while parking, cruise control that would slow you down before hitting the car in front of you, and when it started raining on our drive we found out it even had automatic wind shield wipers. Not having driven much in the last two years I was very impressed with the technology. Then when we pulled into the parking ramp at the airport we found more technology. Digital signs displayed how many open parking spaces were each direction, and as we pulled around the rows of parked cars we could see a green light lit above the open spaces to signify they were free.
Zurich’s airport is larger than Geneva’s but still easy to navigate. After Tim and Colleen came out we brought them back to our rental car to drop off their bags then walked back into the airport to catch a train into downtown Zurich. The efficient Swiss train system brought us into the main train station, called the hauptbahnhof, in about 10 minutes. From there we began our tour on pretty much the same path through Zurich’s winding streets, that Melissa and I had taken last December when we saw the city with the Johnsons. We began walking along the ritzy shopping street called Bahnhof strasse, where watches costing hundreds of thousands of francs are displayed in windows, then we made our way to a church called the Fraumunster. There was an open air music festival going on in the church square, but we didn’t stop too long because we had more sites to see.
Our tour next took us across Zurich’s Limmat river where we stopped to look at Zurich’s largest church the Grossmunster. It was unfortunately closed so Tim and Colleen only were able to see it’s famous windows made from thinly sliced agates from the outside. We then continued walking until we came to Lake Zurich where we could see all the tourists feeding the large swans, but due to a low haze, we could only tell Tim and Colleen about the views of mountains that would be visible on a clear day.
It was nearing 7 p.m. and we hadn’t eaten. We still had a long drive ahead of us though, so we opted to go back to the festival by the Fraumunster to grab some quick eats from the food stands we had seen there instead of wasting a lot of time at a sit down restaurant. We came to the Fraumunster right at 7 p.m., and I know this because the church bells started ringing… and ringing… and ringing. The band playing a concert took a break because of the bells, we ordered food (sausages that came with a hard piece of bread instead of a bun), and I ate all my food, all while the bells were still ringing. With all the non-driver’s beers nearly finished, the bells finally stopped ringing at 7:15 p.m.
We walked directly back to the train station when everyone was finished eating. Then took a train back to the airport and loaded into our rental car. There was a bit of rain, but as the sun was setting, the clouds cleared out and the Jura mountains came into view. Looking towards the Alps, we were also treated with one of the largest double rainbows I have ever seen, (although I only briefly glimpsed while I was focused on driving). We were also treated with views of many, many tunnels. We took a slightly different and longer route home, and the area was actually rather flat, but the Swiss seemingly had infrastructure money to burn, so we went through tunnels with one wall open, tunnels under old cities, and even tunnels without a fulling formed roof.
Around 11 p.m. we made it back to the apartment where everyone crashed from the busy day, and quickly found their way to bed to rest for Sunday’s packed schedule of travel.
