Sheep Guarding Llama

We slept in some this morning.  We have been debating what to do today.  I am convinced that we need a day of downtime, but Dominica is in favour of hoping a train somewhere to go see a castle or another city or something.  In the end our sleeping in pretty much resolved that question.  Originally we had been planning on going to see the famous “local” castles but the cost is really high to do this and the castles are really quite silly – the one is a real castle but only marginally interesting as castles go and the other is a never used castle built pretty recently and while it is beautiful and kind of interesting it is interesting only from an architectural standpoint and has zero historic significance and the interior was never even finished.  It was used as the master for the Disney castles but that is its most important cultural influence ever and as it is really just a facade the Disney castles are actually more important and just as authentic.  It exists only to be a tourist attraction so I’m more than willing to pass on that.

We had thought about doing Salzburg or someplace else today but that would be a lot of traveling and just to hop off of the train, walk around until we are exhausted and ride the train back.  That is a bit too stressful for us at this point.  Best to stay local here in München for our last day and just enjoy where we are and maybe relax just a little bit.  We will be in Austria for the next four days – no need to go there a day early just to be someplace new.

So we did breakfast down in our hostel.  It isn’t bad but we didn’t allow ourselves enough time and I didn’t even manage to get a second cup of coffee at the buffet because Luciana was needing to walk around so much that I had to spend all of my time watching her.  But the food is decent and Dominica really likes it because they have all you can eat yoghurt and müsli.

Once we were ready to face the day I looked into using the local tram system to get us back to the Marienplatz but discovered that that was too costly and complicated and required so much walking that it made no sense at all.  So I finally convinced Dominica to give walking a try.  She is tired of walking everywhere but we definitely need to keep up the exercise with all of the food that we are eating.

The walk to the Marienplatz really was not bad at all.  Dominica’s goal for the day, however, was to see the performance of the famous city hall glockenspiel here in town and our only hope was to make it for the noon performance as we missed it yesterday and it we would be out of town before it would do it tomorrow.  It was twenty till noon when we left the hostel and it was estimated to take thirty minutes to get there on foot.  So with Liesl in the stroller and Luciana strapped to me we booked hard through the streets to see if we could get there in time.  This turned what likely would have been a nice, casual walk into a practical race, but we made it just in time having to run past the amazing city center fountain that was along our route.

The glockenspiel was pretty cool but not as cool as the one in Bern in the clocktower there.  This one is only about one hundred years old but is more elaborate.  There was a huge crowd in the city plaza to watch it.  Still amazing, though, all of that clockwork movement and music.

Before we left the plaza we took the girls to see the living statue there.  Liesl was a little afraid so did not get her picture taken with him but Dominica did.  So once we have good Internet access maybe people will get to see that.

From the plaza we went on foot searching out the famed public market that is sponsored by the city.  It has the outdoor beer garden that Rick Steves shows on his television show and that people often talk about.  It took some doing but we found it without too much of a problem.  We love our open air European markets and are getting pretty good at navigating them and buying food there so we did that.

We picked up fruits, cheese and some hot sandwiches and headed for the beer garden where you can bring your own food (and everyone does) as long as you buy your beers there.  The city sponsors the beer and puts all of the local breweries on rotation to support them.  A pretty cool idea for the city to do and a great use of city resources.  The place is packed and helps the brewers but also supports the market too making it a hot spot of activity.

Getting beers at the market is easy.  There is a stand in the middle of the garden and you just walk up and grab as many as you want as they have them already poured for you.  The price for a half litre is the same as half the price of a litre so there is no advantage to getting a smaller portion – this is a standard means of not promoting drunkenness throughout Europe but a novelty to Americans where good behaviour is seldom encouraged proactively.

The beer was excellent as was our food.  Dominica and I each had a half litre of the local beer.

After our lunch we went back and hit more of the market.  We found a local maker of Turkish delight so we picked up twenty Euros worth – not a trivial amount of Turkish delight even from a high end, hand made local maker.  I have had Turkish delight before but never a variety of it and Dominica has never had it at all.  This was the perfect place to introduce the girls to it as Turkish cuisine is an important one in Germany much like Mexican is in the United States or Indian in the UK.  Without actually going to Turkey this is likely the best that we will find.  And it was quite excellent.  We had the seller just hook us up with a variety that he picked out.

While we were getting the Turkish Delight, someone stopped and asked us in English what they were selling and we got into a conversation with her – and she turned out to be from Austin, Texas!  We are finding it really amazing how often we are running into people from someplace or another related to us.  Two girls from Utica yesterday, two women from Austin today, a whole family from Denton, Texas last week.  It just keeps happening over and over again.  It is really neat making connections with new people from back home when abroad, though.  Helps to keep things interesting.  We had a really nice conversation in the market.

We shopped for a while longer then returned to the beer garden but got no beer.  We just grabbed some fish from Nordsee, the fast food place that I ate at while in Germany in 2009, and ate it at a table and took the opportunity to use the facilities there.

Even though we had not been out for very long we were feeling pretty tired so decided to return to the hotel.  Today really did need to be a “down” day.  So we took a much more casual walk back the way that we had come.

We stopped at the fountain this time and since it was hot Luciana and I stepped into the fountain mist for a bit and cooled off.  Liesl declined.  I think that she was a little nervous at the force of the fountain.  It is a huge fountain but really gorgeous.  One of my favourite fountains ever.  Tons of water and all at level so that you can walk into it.  I’m sure that on really hot summer days that it is a popular place for kids to run and play.  Today people were gathered around it but no one was actually going into it.

On the walk back we ran into two students from Illinois and we walked and talked with them for a while since they were going our direction.

We had been on the look out for good gelato but never found the shop that we wanted all of the way back so as we passed the hauptbahnhof we ran in and got gelato from the place that we like in there.  The gelato is excellent there but the guy who dips it is really careless and your cone is falling apart before you take your first taste.  So you have to be careful and a double is the largest that you can get there safely.

We got back to the hotel and it was probably heading towards four o’clock.    Everyone was tired though.

Dominica had to spend the evening packing as we leave for Hallstatt, Austria tomorrow.  She is really starting to hate every piece of clothing and anything else that we have with us.  She is also regretting the number of places that we are going.  The pain of moving is wearing on her more and more each time and she is dreading each future move all the more.

My job this evening was to go down to the lobby a few times and attempt to get some updates out and, if possible, some of our pictures.  Our pictures have been backing up on us and it takes me many hours to get even a handful of pictures uploaded from here.  That is both annoying and stressful as we try to get things done while here.  It is veyr hard to do anything when we have to spend so much time doing the most trivial tasks online.  Email, Facebook, Flickr, SGL, Kidding Around Europe… we had plans to do so much and we can barely get to anything.

I wrote for a while tonight and at least got a few things posted.  SGL is up to date and only today’s update itself did not get completed.  I got maybe fifteen pictures uploaded.  A good number considering the pain involved but a ridiculously small number overall.

While I was down in the lobby the second time (I had to come and go depending on what the girls were doing as far as sleeping) a crowd appeared so I moved to the bar area to get away.  While in the bar area some kids came in to play pool and I was in the way so I moved to the bar itself and ended up hanging out with Marlene who works the front desk in the evenings and had checked us in the first night and one of the girls that I had seen this morning at breakfast and one of the other front desk girls as they were all hanging at in the bar.  We probably hung out, along with the bar tender, for an hour.  Marlene was from Berlin and only moved to München recently for work.  The girl from the breakfast buffet had moved up from Lake Constance (or there abouts) and was not a local either.  I believe that our bartender was actually local.  Bavaria is a place that a lot of people move to for opportunities, it is very affluent.  We had a good time, though, and I learned more about the city and region.

Some Canadians came in and joined me at the bar, two guys from Montreal and a girl from British Columbia.  We hung out for another hour or so and had a good time.  They invited me to go out to the beer hall with them but I knew better.  I’ll be hurting tomorrow if I go out late tonight.  And I already had four large beers in the hotel so going out would be a major drinking night, it isn’t like I didn’t have a half litre at lunch too.

So at eleven thirty (yes, that early) I went up to the room to go to bed.  Everyone was already asleep so I just fell into bed.

I woke up to Liesl tapping me on the arm at eight.  “Daddy, the sun is up!”  Liesl is a firm believer in getting up with the sun.  And she believes that everyone around her needs to believe this too.  She has been like this for months.

Dominica was up and showered.  Then we all went down to the “restaurant” in the hostel for our free breakfast that we received for not getting the baby bed that we had ordered.  Breakfast was nice, nothing special.  I brought the laptop down with me and managed to upload all of the SGL updates but failed to upload more than four pictures to Flickr while I was there because the uploads kept timing out.  This is going to be tough.

We went back up to the room and Luciana fell asleep.  Then Dominica and Liesl decided to take a nap.  It started raining first lightly then quite hard.  We looked at the weather forecast and it is rain and thunderstorms all week.

So I returned to the lobby and plugged in my laptop so that I could work on updates and see if I could get any more pictures to upload.  As we have hundreds waiting to upload we are a bit desperate to get that process underway as it might take forever.  And as the upload to Flickr is our only real form of backup of the pictures getting them up there is far more important than just sharing them with family back home.

After only a few minutes in the lobby where I got plugged in and back online, water started dripping from the lobby ceiling and then dripped faster and faster and soon the whole back quarter of the lobby was raining.  It started just coming from one light fixture but soon was coming through several as well as the smoke detector and other fixtures.  The power started flickering.  Definitely not good.

Our hotel, being a hostel, is completely full of college students.  Pretty much all from the US which is pretty silly.  So all you hear here is English and it is not like being in a foreign country at all.  Apparently Munchen is “the” travel destination in Europe for American college students.  I guess I kind of knew that but I really never understood.  We’ve seen practically no American tourists on this trip until we arrived here.  Now they are all that we see.  Even walking the street outside, every conversation is in English and embarrassing hearing hte things that Americans say when traveling abroad.

It is no wonder that Americans think that everyone in Europe speaks English, if everyone comes to just a few places like this that cater to Americans you will, of course, hear English everywhere.  I feel like we are the only Americans who ever go anywhere not designated purely for tourists.  Traveling abroad, which is supposed to be so good for students, is pointless if you come to places like this and are shielded from the local culture completely – wrapped in an English speaking, American catering bubble of protection.  It is like going to Cancun in the hopes of learning about Mexican culture!

Now that we are done with work and school (my grades aren’t in yet but the final project that I did late into the night last Friday has been graded and I got a one hundred on it – so I am glad that I didn’t work any more as at the time I was considering another two to three hours on it and getting no sleep at all that night) I am attempting to task myself with writing roughly ten thousand words per day.  So far so good except for the Luzern travel day and that one was not really my fault – there was no time to even attempt writing that day.  I am getting better at writing on the trains now too.

Being in Europe is really making me want to get back into bicycling.  Everyone here rides a bike and they do such interesting things with them.  They have great pull-behind carts for the kids to ride in, they have different types of bikes that we do in the US, they travel all over from country to country with them.  Dominica and I keep talking about making getting nice bikes, a pull behind cart for Liesl and Luciana, and riding all over Europe.  What an adventure that would be.  We could easily carry as much luggage as we have now on bike, especially if we had a tow-behind or, possibly, two of them.  Two would be nice because we could carry tons more stuff and the girls could either ride together or separately.  I wonder how old Liesl could get and still be okay riding in one of those.  If she had her iPad (or whatever) it seems like she would enjoy it for a long time.  I’m not sure how much weight those can carry or how big of a child can comfortably fit in them.

I did a little research and found that bikes have come a really long way since I last bought one (I bought my awesome aluminum frame Schwinn racing bike in 1991 and my mountain bike was just a casual purchase in 2000 or 2001.)  They even have what are called ebikes now that have electric assist.  That could make biking to and from the office very doable.  It isn’t like my car has air conditioning.  Biking under my own power completely would be a rather sweaty thing to do and pretty difficult but with electric assist and my rather flat commute it might work out really well.  So we are toying with looking into those.  Trek makes electric assist that is supposed to get as much as forty miles without any human intervention.  That’s pretty impressive.

Once the girls were awake today after their morning naps we decided that we just wanted to do a bus tour of the city.  Actually Dominica wanted to do a bus tour and I wanted to walk to Marienplatz where the famous beer hall is and just do that.  But the bus won out and, in reality, it was the safer decision given the strength of the storms that were hitting today.  We could have been caught out in heavy rain rather far from the hotel or one of our destinations.

The bus tour here is the Greyline (is it Grey Line everywhere in the world?) and it is hop on / hop off and leaves from the München Hauptbahnhof.  So we packed up and walked to the train station, grabbed some amazing gelato from inside of the station and went around the corner where the bus was waiting.  Perfect timing.  We loaded up and grabbed seats at the very back of the top of the bus so that the girls wouldn’t have to be quite so contained.

Unfortunately because of the rain and general logistics in München we have very few pictures to share.  Sorry about that.

München is, as we saw on our bus trip, a truly gorgeous city.  It has some amazing history and is one of the larger cities of Europe with a metro area of 5.6 million – making it nearly the same as the metro areas of Houston, Philadelphia or the Dallas – Fort Worth metroplex.  A big, big city.

The history and architecture, of which München is often touted, really is something to behold and a large number of fountains.  There seems to be one at every turn.

We rode for about fifty minutes and got dropped off at the Marienplatz and made our way directly to the city’s landmark Hofbräuhaus beer hall.  We got in and got to see the live Bavarian band, including accordion player, play for a bit although they were on break for the majority of our meal.  Very cool, though.  We got real Bavarian food – Dominica got dumplings in a mushroom stew which was excellent, I got potato cakes in a tomato sauce which would give you the impression of a Bavarian take on lasagna and Liesl got spätzle with cheese sauce which was very good too.  Dominica got a litre of the dunkle beer which is the more traditional Bavarian style and I got a litre of the house original beer.  It was all excellent.

While we were eating the rain returned much more fierce than before and quickly turned to a serious hailstorm.  We were quite glad that we had opted to eat inside rather than out in the courtyard which had looked quite inviting but I convinced Dominica that Liesl would be upset by the cold and complain so just sitting inside would be the more prudent way to go.  While the hail was coming down we met a couple from Florida who were on vacation who were sitting at the table behind us.  Americans everywhere.

Luciana was in a mood to walk after our food was finished so I walked with her quite a bit as she explored the beer hall.  She led me up to the second floor, which I knew nothing about, and discovered the “festival hall” where there was a one man band playing traditional Bavarian dance music for the locals – no tourists here.  Luciana and I were the only ones in the hall under sixty-five, maybe more.  This is where the locals come for the traditional dancing.  It was awesome.  So, of course, Luciana and I had to head out onto the floor as well.  Nothing like taking my little Luciana polka dancing in Bavaria.

After we danced we went back downstairs where Dominica had ordered dessert and was halfway through some traditional Bavarian apple (apfel) dessert.  I joined her and we finished that, got Liesl done with her meal, finish our beers (I had ordered another half litre of the weight beer as well) and then paid and packed up everything to head back upstairs so that I could take Liesl dancing too.

Dominica danced with Luciana just a tiny bit but mostly they just stood out on the side.  Dancing with Luciana just involves holding her and swaying.  Liesl actually headed out on the dance floor with me and actually danced along with the crowd for a while.  Funnily enough the Bavarian music had given way to Bavarian-polka styled American tunes like Sugar, Sugar by the Archies and Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash but we danced all the same.  We had a lot of fun.  The locals thought that it was great and the girls got tons of attention.  They are very popular.

This was definitely a highlight of our trip.  Dancing with my girls as if we actually lived in München and not tourists.  This was very special.

As we were leaving we ran into three Disney photographers from Orlando who were on vacation (two on vacation and one over to study in Lyon but still vacationing in München) and offered to take our picture.  So we have a picture of us together in the festival hall.  There were not dancing but just watching from the sideline.  There were some tourists who would watch the dancers from time to time but I’m the only one brave enough to take my girls out to actually dance.  We talked to the Floridians for a while.  We took their picture too and when I did I realized that they were using the Nikon AW100, the same as me, so that sparked a conversation and it turned out that the owner of the AW100 was a Nikon D90 user too!  They’ll be checking up on us on KiddingAroundEurope,com – which is woefully far behind.  At least SGL is keeping up.

It was getting late so we were actually running a bit late so we had to panic a bit to get to the bus stop for the final pick up of the day.  We only made it by a few minutes.

There was only one stop left on the bus route so the trip back was pretty quick and we really didn’t see anything new.  We got dropped off back at the train station where we got some gelato, again, and then walked back to the hotel.  We were decently tired already by that point.  It doesn’t take all that much to wear us out these days.

Getting posts and pictures uploaded from our hostel is nearly impossible.  It can take around an hour to upload a dozen pictures if nothing goes wrong.  So we are doing it as much as we can whenever an opportunity allows but it is a struggle.  We are falling farther and farther behind on the pictures.  We are really hopeful for good Internet access in Austria but don’t know if we will have any let alone if it will be any good.

 

Today was supposed to be our easy day.  We had everything figured out ahead of time.  We had plenty of time to make everything work.  We knew exactly what to do.  Argh.

So we got up early this morning and got moving right away so that we could check out of the hotel, get downtown Zurich so that Dominica would get a chance to see it for a little bit and then get to the hauptbahnhof with plenty of time so that it would be a nice, relaxed day with our direct connection right to Munchen (Munich) with about four hours on the train.  Nice and easy.

I was pretty tired this morning after my really long, stressful day yesterday.  Dominica was not feeling well this morning either – we are guessing that it is a result of the lack of protein.

We got into Zurich without a problem.  Of course it was bright and warm again so the walk to the train station was long and hot – not the way to really start the day.  Then the S6 ride which is a little stressful just because it is full of people and we are so loaded down with luggage that even the most trivial things become really hard.  Anytime that we don’t have our luggage things are good.  Anytime that we are moving our luggage, things are stressful.

We spent some time trying to figure out how to store our luggage, as Rick Steves recommends, at the train station in the lockers there.  That took about half an hour and by the time that we found them, figured out how to get to them and figured out how they worked we had a maximum of an hour and a half to see Zurich and we needed the huge lockers that cost nine Swiss Francs which is way too much money to pay to store luggage for an hour and a half.  So we abandoned that plan.

Instead we decided to just take the luggage with us, walk the river towards the lake and get some coffee at a cafe along the way and call that our sight seeing of Zurich.  Zurich is a city to live in anyway, not a city for tourists.  Other than the beauty of the city itself, one museum that I really want to see but can’t and some Chegal church windows, there isn’t much.

Walking the city with the luggage, and the girls, is not trivial.  We are carrying a lot of stuff.  But if we didn’t do this walk this morning there would be no chance to see Zurich for Dominica at all (other than from the train windows en route to Luzern) and none for me except seeing it in the dark last night.  So we trudged on.

Of course, it was late so the breakfast options were gone already.  And it is a holiday (Pentecost) so most everything is closed.  There were a surprising number of people out on the streets though, mostly walking and bicycling.

We decided that none of the cafes that we saw really looking to be all that inviting.  The menus were lacking and none had a good view and everything looked really expensive.  So instead we found a doner stand just opening (doner stands are completely ubiquitous in western Europe) and got falafel sandwiches and a pizza for Liesl.  It turns out, and I had no idea, that Dominica had never had a falafel sandwich before!  Doner stands like these are just as common in New York City as they are here, or nearly so, and I’ve had falafel sandwiches so much that it never occurred to me that she did not eat them regularly as well.

Dominica completely loves falafel sandwiches.  We have a new travel food now.  Falafel is pretty healthy and always vegetarian so a perfect choice for us.  It is usually a really cheap meal too.  In this case, it was not, but it was probably pretty cheap compared to other options.  Our sandwiches were nine Swiss Francs each!  That’s crazy.  Basically ten dollars.  That would be two to three dollars in New York City.  They were quite good, though.

We ate our food standing in a shaded spot on the river in Zurich.  A great spot and there was hardly anyone around where we were.

Once we finished eating we walked back to the train station.  We were very tired already and had probably walked two to three kilometers hauling all of our luggage behind already today and that was wearing us out quickly.

We got back to the train station without any issue, double checked our train information and headed to the platform.  In Switzerland, Germany and France we have never, ever seen a train schedule be wrong unlike Belgium where they appear to be incorrect around half of the time.  So we tend to panic when we have no need to do so.

This is where our trouble began.  We were so early for the train that we had to wait on the platform for a while.  The first train came and went.  But when the next train came Dominica was sure that it was our train.  It sure could have been – sometimes they arrive quite early and sit on the platform for a while just because of how the schedule works out.  Sometimes you get to a platform thirty minutes early and your train is already there.  So when this train was thirty minutes early I was surprised but it was a real possibility, even if unlikely, that it was our train.  I asked her if it was our train and she said “yes” and we boarded.

Now we’ve had this discussion over and over again on this trip – we can never trust just one person’s judgement as to anything to do with the trains.  We are constantly making mistakes and need everything double checked whether it is departure times, track numbers or whatever.  Now, to be fair, I did set about immediately attempting to double check the train once we were on it.  What I failed to do was walk down the platform and read the sign telling what train it was.  When I asked Dominica if this was the train I had assumed that she had read that sign and there is no way to misread that.  But in fact she had misunderstood my question and thought that I had read the sign.

Unfortunately we have so much luggage and with the kids getting onto the train and even doing something as simple as checking the exact time is a major exercise.  So it probably took ten minutes to get the luggage stowed, Luciana out of her harness that I was carrying her in and the laptop plugged in, as it was out of juice and could not power up, so that I could see the time.  The moment that the laptop came up I looked at the time and knew that we were sixteen minutes before intended departure time.  The instant that I saw the time…. the train started to move.  Crap.

I knew what had happened instantly and looked at Dominica and said “It’s too early, this is the wrong train.”  We grabbed the first person we could find and asked where the train was going…. Basel.  Thank goodness.  This could have been the express to Milan.  In fact, that was a decently likely possibility.  Basel was very likely the case for the “wrong train”.  But even so, our low stress, easy train day just turned into a disaster.

Basel is fifty minutes away, in the wrong direction, from Munchen.  So we had to rapidly come up with alternative travel plans.  We found the Berlin run leaving Basel very shortly after when we would arrive so it would be a rush but we should be able to make it.  That would take us up the Rhine past Freiburg and get us to the east – west run to Munchen.  So instead of four hours and no transfers we are now six and a half hours and two transfers.  Sad face.

For those who have never traveled with two little children and a ton of luggage you really can’t understand how painful a transfer is.  To make a transfer we have to pack for ten minutes prior to arrival (and watch the clock carefully the entire trip to make sure that we don’t miss our prep window) and get everything off of the train very quickly before the train leaves again.  This is harder than it sounds and is physically strenuous and is a leading reason why we are in so much pain.  Every train day results in a day of not being able to move my head from side to side because of the physical strain.  Then we have to figure out in a split second how to navigate a new train station (without the aid on English signs) and about one out of four have no lifts so we are stuck running everything up and down stairs which is so hard that the easiest thing for me to do is actually to pick up the stroller with Liesl in it and run the whole thing down in one shot no matter how awkward or heavy it is.  Then find the right platform for our next train, get to it, make sure that we are getting on to the correct train (hardy har har) and load everything onto that train.  Then it takes nearly ten minutes for us to get all of the luggage stowed, release the children and settle in.  It is hard and it is stressful.  Avoiding it even once is a really big deal.  And each transfer is when we are terribly fearful that we will lose something else.  It was a day like today when we lost my fleece jacket going from Brugge to Boppard two weeks ago.

The laptop was dead this morning so we used every moment possible on the first train, an SBB line, to charge it as the DB trains often do not have power yet but SBB reliably does.  Although I have been trying to figure out if this is because we mistakenly road second class on DB for the first several times and should have been in first class and since we started using SBB we knew to always look for first class.  It might be something that simple.

The transfer at Basel was fine.  No spare time to get coffee or anything but that was okay.  We know the Basel station and it is very low stress, as stations go.  In fact, it might be our lowest stress station.

The ride up the Rhine was pretty short.  So we didn’t really have time to relax.  The rapid transfers take a toll on the girls tool.   They don’t get a chance to settle in and we don’t let them nap or get set up with their toys which is really tough.  The ride is still long and having almost nothing to do is hard for them.  But Liesl remains pretty positive and is always excited about a new place and a new train.  She is the best traveler ever.

The transfer along the Rhine also went smoothly.  We really had to rush for this one having just enough time to leap from one train, run through the station and leap onto the next but we are experts at this (not at reading the signs but at getting rapidly through the stations) and it was fine and not really a panic to any great degree.

Once we were on to our final train we knew that we had a really long time so we could settle in, unpack and relax.  We could take out the toys and sprawl out as it would be over three hours.

This train is an older DB IC train that has the traditional, old individual cabins with the closing doors.  Now this is awesome.  We managed to get one just for our family which is perfect.  It has six individual seats that you raise the armrests and it turns into two benches.  We close the door and we can talk normally, the girls can walk around and we don’t have to follow them constantly or worry about the noise level.  Now this is how to travel.  The cabin even had power.

That would all be perfect except for one little thing.  The heat.  The train had no air conditioning, the windows do not open and even the fan in our cabin was broken and only blew for a small portion of the journey.  Needless to say, it was hot.  Really hot.  Dominica was not handling it well at all.

That made for a really long ride but, overall, it really was not that bad.  Without incident we arrived in Munchen.  Far later than we had intended and far, far more tired but we are here safe and sound and everything is okay.

The Munchen Hauptbahnhof was nice and easy to navigate.  We were out the door and on our way to the hostel in which we are staying which is just less than a kilometer from the train station.  That was a moderately long walk after such a long day and, again, hauling all of our luggage with us but it was very doable and we are quite used to this.  There was no way to get lost as it was a straight shot and not very hilly and the weather in Munchen is beautiful.  The sun was low behind the buildings and the air was cool for a change.  This was much better for a long walk.

We got to our hotel and checked in.  No issues except that the baby bed was broken – or at least they could not figure it out.  So we had to do without but they gave us a free breakfast for tomorrow.

Once we were settled in Dominica immediately went and did a load of laundry.  I went down to the lobby and managed to upload one SGL post.  Lots more to get posted though and it takes forever.  Then she sent me out to go find some food.  I walked all the way back to the train station (1.6km round trip) and got cash and falafels and pizza and brought it all back to the hotel.

By the time that I was back both Liesl and Luciana were fast asleep.  It was around then thirty.  This was a very long day for all of us and we are all completely exhausted and, like we have found pretty much everywhere in Europe, our hotel room is quite warm.  We got off to bed as early as we could.

Dominica decided that tomorrow is going to be a down day.  We will be doing very little in the hopes of catching up on rest, feeling better, getting posts done, etc.  I am hopeful that I will be able to post some pictures tomorrow.  We have not been able to do that at all yet for several days.  And hopefully at breakfast I can get everything that I have for SGL posted.

 

Dominica was up the earliest this morning at around six thirty. She got up and showered and ready for whatever the day might bring. Then she got me up next. I got about five hours of sleep.

When Luciana got up we checked her and her fever had broken. She is acting much more normal. The antibiotics and a good night’s sleep seem to have been just what the doctor ordered (they are, in fact, what the doctor actually ordered.)

So we talked about it and decided that as this would be our one and only chance to go to see Luzern (Lucerne) and because the weather was supposed to be really nice there today that we would go for it. One of our concerns the past several days has been Luciana getting was too warm when we are out and we did not want that to happen again. But Luzern is supposed to be nice and cool today and missing a great weather day out and about would be a shame.

We had to walk back to the Regensdorf train station and managed to catch the S6 returning to the Zurish Haptbahnhof at a little after ten. We got into Zurich, which takes twenty minutes or so on the S6, and managed to get on the SBB heading south to Luzern pretty quickly.

The train heading south was a double decker SBB that was very modern. We were fortunate to find a really cool curved seating area just for us with a little round table. It was perfect for our family. European trains often have some interesting seating options.

Luzern from Zurich is a pretty short train ride. Maybe forty-five minutes. The trip out of Zurich goes south along the western shore of Lake Zurich which is so beautiful. We managed to see a lot of town from the train windows.

Luzern is a much smaller city than Zurich, Bern or Basel but is dramatically more tourist oriented than those other Swiss cities. The main train station is right in the heart of the activity with easy walks to the convention center, the lake front, the river “walk”, the old town and the city’s famous bridges. The Chapel Bridge in Luzern was the big attraction here that Dominica really, really wanted to see.

We headed out on foot and could see the Chapel Bridge immediately so went, more or less, straight for it. The Chapel Bridge is considered to be the oldest wooden bridge in all of Europe. Sadly, much of the bridge burned in a huge fire in 1993. It has been rebuilt but the bridge used to be full of amazing medieval artwork painted up in the rafters. Some of those paintings were saved but a lot of them were lost too. Very sad. There is unlikely anything like this anywhere else in the world.

So we got the “must see” bridge out of the way pretty quickly. From there we walked along one side of the river or another to see the river and the old town that comes down to it. We found another awesome ancient wooden bridge and explored that as well. Then we ventured into old town and found an amazing little bakery where we got egg tarts, coffee and Liesl got a chocolate filled brioche.

Luzern is a completely breathtaking city. So gorgeous. The lake, the river, the old buildings, the churches on the hills and… the hills. Those are the Alps! And not just mountains in the distance or foothills that suggest something larger but the real Alps. Huge mountains, white caps, ringing the city. Amazing.

We looked through the city map and guide while at the bakery and decided that what we really wanted to do was to see Mount Pilatus which is considered one of the big attractions in town and one of the things that we remember from Rick Steves (who also taught us about the bridge.)

So we walked down to the water front and inquired about the tour to Mount Pilatus. We ended up getting the “Golden Ticket” which includes a boat tour of Lake Luzern, a cog railroad ride on the mountain, a funicular ride and a gondola ride down the mountain and bus transportation back to the Luzern train station. Not a cheap tour at ~$200 but it is a really unique experience and “the” thing to do in Luzern. It would be awful to miss it and we are not planning on doing any other Alpine stuff while we are here with the girls this young so it would be great to get to do this one thing.

We bought our tickets for the tour at one o’clock and the boat was scheduled to leave at one forty so we went to pier one and got ice cream cones to eat while we waited.

We sat in the back of the boat so that it would be easier for the girls Far fewer crowds there.

The lake tour by boat took about an hour and a half. It was not so much a tour as it was a passenger boat that made about seven or eight stops at the little towns around the lake. But the views were incredible . The ride was a lot longer than I would have liked but it was quite enjoyable.

The final stop of the boat is at the farthest point of the lake from Luzern itself at a little town known only for its cog railroad – the steepest cog railway in the world. The train departing right after we arrive by boat was already full so we had to wait for the next one which went at around three fifty-five, nearly an hour after we had arrived by boat. We had no idea that this entire process would take so long. We had imagined that this would be a relatively quick process, but this is going very slowly.

While waiting in the queue to get onto the cog railroad we met a woman originally from Houston but now living in Manhattan but working for a month in Zug, which we had come through on the train earlier today. We talked for quite a while and when we embarked on the cog railroad we shared a compartment.

The cog railway ride up Mount Pilatus takes about forty minutes. The ride is pretty interesting. It is amazing climbing the mountain side like that and the views, when you can see them, are great. What really amazed me was the large number of people that we passed the entire way up who were either climbing up or down the mountain! This is a seven thousand foot Alpine peak, not a trivial walk in the park and yet there were people climbing everywhere. And the people climbing did not look like hard core mountain climbers but just serious hikers. That is even more impressive when you see the amount of snow that they are climbing through. Liesl really liked the cog railway ride. Luciana seemed to enjoy herself but only so much.

At the top of the mountain is a train station, which feels very odd. We got off of the train and in the station is a restaurant, a shop, an information booth and even the check in desk for a hotel. All very odd for an Alpine summit.

We went outside to the observation “deck” where it was forty-four degrees but felt decently warm with the unfiltered sun beating down on us. It was blindingly bright and almost impossible to see anything as I didn’t have sunglasses or a hat. Important notes for anyone looking to do this in the future. And bringing a fleece would be wise too. We took a picture of Dominica is her very short sleeve t-shit and flip flops standing in a snow bank to show how ill prepared we were for doing this. We had not thought about this in any way before leaving Zurich.

With the kids we were really unable to do much of anything on the summit since almost everything required being exposed for a long period of time and climbing stairs. Not things that we were going to do. We figure that we will do this again when the girls are much older and they can climb things on their own. We will save the extended Mount Pilatus experience for some time far in the future.

We did try to get some food on top of the mountain so that we would have an excuse to sit and enjoy the view. When I saw the prices, though, I declined to get anything. Dominica got a coffee and a slice of apple something or other. This is actually the first place in all of Europe where the food was actually bad. We ate it because we paid so much for it. But it is definitely something to be avoided. They assume that they are selling to the desperate and that no one will ever return to eat there again so zero incentive to do a good job and it shows. This is one of the truly “pure tourist” spots in Europe.

We spent no more than, I would say, twenty minutes on top of the mountain. While the whole “I’m on top of a huge Alpine mountain!” thing is pretty cool and the views really are something, the experience seems to lack something. Maybe it is the crowds, maybe it is the tacking tourist sales traps, maybe it is the surprise of it taking many hours, I’m not sure. But there is certainly a part of me that wishes we hadn’t spent most of a day doing this particular experience as cool as it is.

We actually had to skip pretty much any attempt to explore at the mountain top because the last funicular trip down from the mountain was at five thirty and as crazy as it sounds, there is only just enough time to buy a ticket at one in the afternoon, take the first boat, take the first train and look around for fifteen or twenty minutes and then get in line for the funicular. The line was incredibly long and we had to wait and wait as funiculars came to and from the mountain only every fifteen minutes.

As it was, we actually were among the last to get in to the five thirty funicular after having waited in line for a very long time. People behind us were beginning to panic about being left behind and there was a constant attempt by one group or another to line jump and I was concerned about being violently pushed away from the rest of the family when I went to go through the still. It was a concerning scene with horrible management and a complete lack of information. I was getting pretty upset with how the whole thing was handled and it was really crappy spending all that money and all that time and doing almost nothing but waiting in lines and not having been warned when they sold us the ticket that they might have sold us a ticket that could not be used because it was too late in the day. One o’clock in the afternoon should not be the final cutoff for an attraction without even a warning.

So it worked out okay and we were put onto a completely and ridiculously packed funicular where I had to carefully brace myself against the wall to ensure that Liesl and Luciana were not crushed since people were just being rude in there and people were panicking. But it worked out okay but it was neither comfortable nor fun. Not impressive at all.

To make matters worse, much worse, in fact, just as we were getting to the front of the line to get onto the funicular Liesl decided that it was an emergency and she needed to use the potty. Well that wasn’t going to happen. A bathroom run would ensure that we were buying a hotel room on top of the mountain for the night and if that was priced like the food it would likely have been between five hundred and a thousand dollars. So Liesl had to hold it which involved a lot of crying.

After the funicular ride there is a stop at a high mountain station where they have a summer luge track which Rick Steves featured in his show on Luzern. Dominica really wanted to do this but obviously we cannot do anything extra here today. Fortunately this halfway station had a restroom that Liesl was able to use while I held out place in line for the gondolas that would take us the rest of the way down the mountain.

While we were at this halfway station, one of the crazy people that I was worried about doing something rash to take my place on the funicular took his ten year old son and the two of them shared a stall in the women’s washroom. Which might have been acceptable had the child been six years younger and if the men’s room had had a single person using it, but it didn’t. So they were just crazy, creepy people. Just validating my concerns about them acting strangely back at the top of the mountain.

The gondola portion of the descent was way, way better than the funicular portion. The gondolas run continuously so it is just a matter of waiting for one and they are small, only holding about four people so we got a private one just for our family which was very nice.

Liesl thought that the gondola ride was great. It was fast and really great views and being able to do it just our family was so nice.

Partway down the mountain on the gondola there was another stop at another mountain station and our family gondola picked up a single passenger who did not speak English.

Once at the bottom of the mountain it is a bit of a walk, but all downhill, to the bus station and then a short wait for the city bus that takes us from there into downtown Luzern at the train station. It is really amazing how you take this boat ride so far to get to the start of the mountain journey and then you end up magically back in the outskirts of Luzern when you are done. That part was pretty neat.

While waiting for the train we met two families who are from Savanna, Georgia but are currently living in Basel, Switzerland. Liesl talked to some of the kids and gave out some of her Kidding Around Europe stickers. She has been getting really good about giving those out recently.

The bus ride into town only takes a few minutes. We decided to do nothing but go directly to the train and get back to Zurich. We had never intended to be away from the hotel for so long today. The Mount Pilatus tour took us roughly six hours from the time that we started (one o’clock) until we got back (seven o’clock) which was just way, way longer than we had wanted to do that. That was completely unexpected. We really had wanted to have been back around five or maybe six at the latest. Now it was seven and we were just starting to look for a train to take us home.

We ended up having about an hour to kill in the train station in Luzern so we took the opportunity to hit the Coop, the other major Swiss grocery store chain that we have not yet been in, to do some grocery shopping. Now that was an experience.

Like most of Europe, Switzerland shuts down at night, on Sundays and on holidays. Tomorrow is Pentecost and a big holiday in Switzerland. So we are guessing that this combination of factors has created a “zombie apocalypse” style food panic in Luzern’s train station where everyone knows that if they don’t get groceries tonight that they will starve tomorrow. Neither of us has ever seen anything like this. It was wall to wall people and getting to food was actually quite hard. The check out line wrapped nearly all the way around the store and you couldn’t get to most of the food because the whole place was just people attempting to check out. Crazy.

We got on the train home without a problem. We were all completely exhausted at this point. We ate our dinner on the train. We got one of the same second story round table family spots that we got this morning. Very nice. Perfect for hanging out and relaxing and having our dinner on the train back to Zurich.

The plan today had originally to hang out with my friend David, who used to work with me for the “office” and was based in Belfast. We’ve been on Facebook together for years and he has been living in Zurich for a while now. So he was going to show us around town today but ended up he was moving house today and was unavailable for the majority of the day. He fell asleep after his move and woke up right about the same time that we got back to the hotel, including the S6 trip and the half mile walk to the Movenpick from the Regensdorf train station.

David called and said that he was up for a couple of beers. Dominica said that I should go so I walked very briskly back to the train station and caught the S6 back into town hoping to get back to Zurich’s main station by ten o’clock. I was amazed by the number of people heading into town, clearly all dressed for a night on the town. Apparently going out in Zurich is the thing to do.

I got to the Zurich station and met David under the big blue angel. I wasn’t sure what to expect when he said to meet him there but once I saw it I realized that it is a huge art installation that Rick Steves has featured before. So I knew it instantly.

We took the Zurich tram a few stops away to Bellevue, the trendy district where everyone goes out for beers in the evening on the river and lakefront. This is my first real chance to see the city of Zurich itself and I must say that this is one gorgeous city. At night, the lake front all lit up is magical.

We found a little bar with outdoor seating and just sat at a table and had a few beers and caught up. It was a nice time and it was nice to get to go out like a normal Zuricher as well. Gave me a legitimate feel for this part of Zurich life. David filled me on as to his experiences in Zurich as well.

I think that my take away from being in Zurich, Bern and Luzern (and passing through Basel several times) and dealing with trains, tourists, trams, shopping, groceries, etc. in Switzerland that while I really like it here and woudn’t turn it down, Switzerland does not appear to be the place where I am really interested in living. Everyone that I’ve spoken to who is an ex-patriot working here says that it is okay but not that great. The cities are great but the working experience is not and the cost of living is insane. Now I have no experience with rural or village life in Switzerland and that is truly what we would be looking at seriously and that is sure to be far better overall, but this gives us a general taste.

The biggest issue is the “English bubble.” Everyone in Switzerland speaks English and so the moment that they realize that you are not a Swiss local they immediately switch to English for you and treat you like a tourist. They are friendly and polite – but you are forever an outsider. Even learning the language is next to impossible because no one will speak it to you. It makes working in Switzerland very easy and convenient for companies moving people in and out regularly and it is nice for people who are stuck working in Switzerland who didn’t really want to or who are not into being in Switzerland. But for someone really interested in becoming immersed and a part of the local culture it makes it a significant challenge. So, for now at least, Switzerland is effectively off of our list of consideration.

The bar that we were at closed at eleven thirty, which I think is really weird. Apparently Switzerland, or at least Zurich, has bizarre bar licensing laws like the UK which make it incredibly difficult as a bar patron to be able to figure out how to go out at night. I have no idea what logic makes this happen but it is horrible. There is no way for an outsider to find out what bar is open till when or how to go out and use the city’s resources. It is bar by bar knowledge so even the locals have no idea where to go or what to do outside of their local bars that they frequent personally. Even going to a different neighbourhood makes you as useless as a foreigner.

I had to get back to the girls and David needed some sleep after moving all day so we took off when the bar closed. He was able to work to his new apartment and I caught the number eleven tram back to the central train station. Once there I came to the horrific realization that there were no trains running back to Regensdorf tonight. None.

Oh no, this isn’t good. It is nearly ten miles back to the hotel. That’s not an easy walk and while I can do it I sure don’t want to do it in a city that I don’t know with an Android phone that never works and that is rapidly running out of battery. I could be completely lost in a matter of minutes and be heaven only knows where by morning. So that was certainly a final resort option.

I called David but he had no idea. He didn’t even know where Regensdorf was and thought that I was staying in a completely different part of the city. So he didn’t know what to do.

There was no one in the train station to help me. It was very late, and rapidly getting later, and all the tourists were gone, all the officials were gone and all of the information people were gone. As were any maps that they have out during the day. This was getting bad quickly.

I posted on Facebook what was happening so if I wasn’t back and Dominica spoke to anyone they could tell her what had happened even if they wouldn’t know where I was at the time.

I spent a bit of time running like a chicken with its head cut off around the train station trying to come up with options. I found a few trains that would take me in the general direction (I think) but that was a scary prospect. Get off of a train at an unknown third location and hope to get good enough directions to make it to the hotel. Eek.

Luckily it occurred to me to, obviously, call the hotel and ask them what to do. The guy who answered the phone had some idea of what to do because he lives local to the hotel and sometimes goes drinking in the general area where I was and had to do this same thing before.

He directed me to leave the train station, cross the river and look for a place called “Central” which is where all of the trams and the busses meet (oh boy, those are not “simple” directions.) Then look for a guy market “Troubleshooter” and ask him for help. Wow. Okay, well I’ve got nothing else to go on so I gave that a try.

It took me a bit to get out of the train station and across the river. This is confusing to an outsider as there is flowing water on both sides of the train station. Apparently only one of them is considered “the” river, though. I picked the right one, got across and after not too long found a mess of roads and tracks with a “central” sign.

There were no officials working so I wondered around for a while trying to make heads or tails of the signage but everything was in German here and very confusing. I finally found some guys in a truck who turned out to be the “troubleshooters”, explained my issue and they helped me out.

The solution turned out to be pretty easy. I had to pay around twelve Swiss Francs and take the N45 night bus and they would go to the Regensdorf Zentrum. Okay, sounds like a plan. Fingers crossed.

Catching the bus actually wasn’t bad once the troubleshooter walked me through all of the steps. The bus was fairly busy, not full, but busy. Fortunately even the Zurich buses have nice computer displays telling where we are currently and what the next several stops were and how long it would be until each one.

It worked out pretty well with the bus dropping me off right at the Movenpick. The Zentrum stop is right at the end of the Movenpick’s driveway. So by one thirty I was back home. About an hour and a half after I should have been, but at least I made it back and have a somewhat interesting story to tell.

Today was a really long day. Dominica was still awake, sort of, when I got home. The girls had given her a hard time while I was out. We are pooped.

Tomorrow we get up and get out the door to head to Munich where we will be for several days. Hopefully that will be a bit more stress free than today has been. We have an early train ride up there but it is only four hours and it is a direct train right from Zurich so it should be nice and easy. We get to relax for four hours and do some SGL catch up. Hopefully once we get to Munich we will be able to post all of the back updates so that everyone can catch up with us to this point.

At this point I am posting well over sixteen thousand words to SGL just on the past week. This has to be my one week writing record ever – and that is in over twelve years of continuous posting!

Dominica got me up at seven this morning after less than three hours of sleep to get me up and moving since we had so much to do today. At first my job was only to watch Luciana who had woken up and was not feeling well so that Dominica could continue getting everything else ready for us to depart Bartenheim. We are attempting to hit the local post office this morning as we have a rather large shipment of stuff that we either no longer need or have realized that we never needed to ship back to dad to keep us from having to lug it all over Europe with us.

At this point my back is really killing me. At first I thought that it was muscle pain but now I am convinced that from either a chair that I have been working from or from the Ergo baby carrier’s strap that I have bruised by spine. One way or another, my back really hurts.

Our goal this morning is to make the nine thirty train to Zurich. We will be taking the same local run on the TER Alsace to Basel but then taking the Zurich line rather than the Bern line. Even getting up at seven in the morning it will be quite a challenge to make it to the nine thirty train. It is never as simple as you would imagine.

Dominica took Luciana’s temperature this morning and it had climbed to one hundred and one. That is too high. She has to see a doctor. She could wait until Zurich for a doctor but we don’t know how medicine works in either Switzerland or France so to be sure that we can’t just get her an antibiotic on our own Dominica decided to go out and investigate the pharmacy situation.

Dominica was gone for a while and when she returned she had quite the story to tell. She had been at the pharmacy across the street. Of course, no one there speaks English. Europeans might universally speak English more than any other tertiary language but almost no one really speaks it. It is never heard in conversation and anytime that you find someone who speaks it you are amazed.

At the pharmacy a local who was a customer there helped everyone to translate. Dominica learned that a prescription written by a doctor would be necessary to get the antibiotic. That is not surprising but it would have been foolish not to check. The woman who was at the pharmacy with Dominica then took Dominica and made her husband drive them all to the local doctor because she realized that Dominica would not be able to find the doctor if forced to work from an address and since she was on foot they knew that she didn’t have time to go looking for them. This is something that would never happen in America. Someone translating in a store? Possible. Someone giving directions? Definitely. Someone driving you to the doctor’s to make sure that you can find it? Um, no, not going to happen.

Even more amazing, the doctor’s office said that they would see Luciana immediately. So Dominica speed walked all the way back to the Lion Rouge and got me. We left the luggage in the room and we took the girls and walked the half kilometer, if I were to guess, back to the doctor’s office.

The doctor was wonderful. No one in the office spoke English but we all made do with a couple of words on either side. Everyone has been so friendly this morning. The pharmacist, the doctor, the people in town. We are so impressed with Bartenheim.

The doctor agreed that Luciana has an infection. I impressed Dominica with my ability to make fever references in Celsius on the fly. Luciana was at 38 and we, and the doctor, expect that if untreated she would hit 39 tonight. She has sinusitis, not an ear infection, but her one ear, and maybe both, are inflamed because of it. But the real issue is her sinuses, no surprise given that she is my daughter, and it is rapidly turning into bronchitis. So he prescribed an antibiotic and a thrice daily nasal wash which she is not going to enjoy. She said that if we were not traveling they would not do the antibiotic at this stage but instead would only do the cleansing and bed rest but as we are traveling and going to Zurich today the antibiotic was necessary. That is nice, in the US it would have been straight to the medicine every time.

We were very impressed with the doctor. Then we went to pay and he said “No, you are on holiday! There is no need.” I can’t believe it. Great, fast, friend healthcare and the French healthcare system is picking up the tab as well! We are so impressed with France right now I cannot even describe. I’ve heard that France is a world leader in healthcare and I kept saying that if Luciana was going to be sick that this was the place for it to happen but never did I imagine that their healthcare was this good. Nor would we have guessed that the kindness of strangers would be so great.

We walked quickly back to town and straight to the pharmacy. Unlike an American pharmacy with a twenty minute to two hour wait on any order, it took no more than two minutes for them to fulfill our order. And, even being foreigners paying full price for everything, the antibiotic (the same one that we get in the US) plus the two nasal products, the one a wash and the other a medicine, came to just thirteen euros or less than twenty dollars.

Let me get this across… the full price for medicine in France is less than the copay amount for the same medicine in the US. The implications should be beyond obvious.

So our takeaway is that we are impressed beyond belief in France and its people and its healthcare. The Lord really watched over us to make sure that we had all of this happen here. Had this been a different country, or in a large city or any number of different factors this could have been really bad. Instead, it was dramatically better in efficiency and in cost than having the same thing happen in the US with health insurance and a car and established relationships with the doctors and pharmacy! France did better under the worst conditions than the US does under the best.

We raced back across the street to the hotel and got checked out. I keep being amazed by how low our bills are even when our food is added on to the hotel bill.

Then it was off to the post office to see it we could ship out that package, but it was obvious that they did not have the facilities there that we needed so we didn’t bother to try and instead raced on to the train station hoping to make at least the ten thirty train as we had missed the nine thirty.

We got to the train station in enough time for the train that Dominica thought was going to be there. It turned out that she had read the train schedule incorrectly and the next train would be at eleven thirty, not ten thirty. So we had an hour to kill.

We were not going to go anywhere as it was just too hot and the walk is too long. So Dominica kept the girls at the train station and I walked over to the grocery store that was not all that far away and picked up some local fruit and some baked goods for breakfast and brought them back to the train station so that we could eat them while waiting on the train.

We have ridden this train line yesterday so we know how everything works (even if we don’t know the times) and the ride into Basel and the transfer in Basel were super easy. The train from Basel to Zurich was pretty quick and easy. I napped a bit of the way. The scenery along the path was quite similar to the scenery that we saw going from Basel to Bern but a little less hilly. Still very beautiful.

We arrived in Zurich and it was a beautiful day. The main train station in Zurich is massive. This is certainly one of the main European rail aggregation points. Getting around the Zurich train station is rather a challenge due to the size, the volume of people and that things are poorly labeled. Lifts, for example, have no signs. You simply have to know where they are.

Once we were in Zurich the challenge was figuring out how to get from there to our hotel. Our hotel in Zurich is not near the train station but is in the suburb of Regensdorf which is several miles from downtown. We spent quite a while trying to get directions on how to get to Regensdorf. Seriously nothing is labeled.

We finally figured out that we could take the S-Bahn S6 line towards Baden that several stops up was Regensdorf. Getting to the S6 turned out to be a challenge as tracks 41-44 are hidden away in a basement and after looking around for as long as we could for a lift we finally had to give up, along with some other people having the same issue, and take the girls and all of our luggage down the escalators as our train was just about to pull up.

Riding the S6 wasn’t too bad but it was full and with all of our luggage it was a struggle. Fortunately the S-Bahn system has nice screens in the passenger cars that tell you where you are, the list of upcoming stops and how long until you reach each one. This makes it far less stressful to be able to get to where you are going and to be able to relax between the stops as you can constantly get an idea of how much longer you have.

We got off at the Regensdorf train station, which is very small, and from there had to figure out how to get to the zentrum. We had hoped that they would be at more or less the same spot but they were not. We checked the map and we had less than a mile to go, so we hoofed it the rest of the way.

The sun was bright and exposed so we got very hot very quickly. We were way too hot by the time that we got to the hotel, the Movenpick Regensdorf. I was completely covered in sweat by the time that we got there.

The Movenpick is awesome. This is our only luxury hotel of our entire month and a half trip. This is a four star hotel. The room was very nice and comfortable. We were so glad to get to a nice, comfortable hotel room without any questions and a twenty-four hour concierge desk and all of that. This is our “downtime” weekend, in theory, so this is perfect.

Our plans today are to do nothing. Nothing at all. Luciana especially needs as much of a day off as we can muster. So we prepared to camp out in the hotel room for a little while and I set up my laptop. The one downside, and this is a pretty big one, to this hotel is that we do not have Internet access while we are here outside of emergencies because we would have to pay ~$20 per day for it and we just are not willing to spend that much now that we are no longer working to have me do my homework and check in with the office. If the office needs me they will reach me through some other means and we will turn the Internet access on at that point.

So my job for today was to write a lot of SGL updates but not to post them until we get Internet access again. So I wrote nearly eleven thousand words this evening that you, my audience, will be reading sometime later. I got almost caught up completely today. That was my goal. That is the only form of “work” that I need to do for the next three weeks and that I can handle.

Once we had relaxed for a little bit we decided to go to the shopping center right next door to the hotel for some supplies. We hit the grocery store there, this is getting to be a normal thing for us, and stocked up on ready-made food (pret a manger) that we will eat tonight rather than going out to a restaurant or whatever. Although I’m not convinced that eating at the grocery store saves any money.

We also did some general shopping and just checked out the shopping center. I am interested in getting some new shoes because mine are killing the ball and toe of my foot when we do long walks and I need something that will cushion them a little bit better. Apparently, though, my feet are enormous by European standards as my size is not carried and the nearest size, which is very close to mine, is available but only in a horribly small selection. So we gave up there. Maybe I will try some insoles to see if they do anything for me.

We came back to the hotel room and ate our dinner and found some television for Liesl to watch. We have things like Nickelodean and Cartoon Network on our television here so Liesl is pretty happy about that. Most of the programming is actually in English but bits are German. She settled in to watch that all evening.

I stayed in with the girls while Dominica went out on her own to do some shopping. Actually she just wanted to get away from all of us. So she shopped for a while, Liesl watched her shows and Luciana and I napped for a while.

Dominica got back and we hung out in the hotel room for just a little bit and then the girls all went to bed. Liesl was the last one down but all three of them were asleep pretty early. I was awake for a few hours longer, until one in the morning or so, working on the SGL updates. I have been so far behind this past week that I really wanted to take the time to get caught up knowing that I would feel even more relaxed tomorrow if I was not worried about the updates not being written. This is a very important trip and if I get behind not only do the folks back home not know what is going on but we risk forgetting what has happened. So I am doing my best to be really, really diligent about it, especially from here on out now that we are in to the “vacation” portion of the trip.

Tomorrow we have to play things by ear. Luciana still has a fever this evening but there is every hope that she will not have it tomorrow. If she still has a fever tomorrow then the plan is to just stay in the hotel all day and do pretty much nothing. But if Luciana is doing okay we will consider going out and seeing Zurich or possibly making a trip out to the south to Luzern to see that town instead. Luzern is Dominica’s number one city to see in Switzerland and possibly in all of Europe (competing with Brugge) at least from before the start of the trip – with only our information from America before leaving. If we don’t see Luzern tomorrow then we don’t get to see it so it would be really sad if Dominica ended up missing that while we are so close.