bodensee

Remember about 2 years ago when I went to Lake Constance for a client and didn't have a clue where I was? Well, I've come to love our team's little trips to Bodensee. It's great in the summer to go for a run or walk along the lake and relax with some beverages after a long day's work!

zurich "art"

One evening I was walking home from the train station along the Limmat river and the sky was so beautiful as the sun was setting that I stopped to take a couple pictures of Zurich's new "art" since I didn't have any pictures yet. The "art" has been a hot topic of discussion in Zurich the past several weeks. It is nothing more than a big old crane. It serves no purpose whatsoever, but has cost taxpayers over 600,000 CHF!

 

triftbrücke hike

Our new GDP (person on assignment from the US) started last week and so I invited her and her husband to join a couple of us on a hike. Our new associate came too. What was supposed to be a fairly easy family hike trail quickly turned into a more challenging hike when we decided not to wait an hour for the gondola to take us most of the way up the mountain and instead hike up. Then we went a little off the trail somehow, walked through mud, slid down hills holding on to trees, used Adrian's satellite gps and finally found the right path. It was a little bit more than our new associate had signed up for, but great fun in the end.

 

The highlight of our hike was the Trift Bridge itself. It is a very long rope bridge across a very deep valley. It was a little scary, but cool to cross.

 

This is the view of the glacier from the rope bridge.

 

Very far down!

 

Sheep farm

 

Here is the little gondola we rode down. It only holds 8 people as it was originally built for the construction workers to work on the hydro-electric plant and only opened for tourism in the past 5 years.

 

We rewarded ourselves for our hike with beers before our ride down.

schwingfest

One day at lunch, we started talking about schwingen, or "Swiss wrestling". It is a popular sport for farmers and they have tournaments or "schwingfests" (with one big tournament once every three years). Daniela decided this was something I definitely needed to experience before I left Switzerland and I'm so glad she did. She and I headed to Canton Lucerne for the day.

Schwingen is kind of hard to explain, but it is AWESOME! Its kind of like sumo-wrestling due to the shorts they wear and the inevitable wedgies. There was a really cute old man that explained the rules to us in english. The goal is to get both of your opponent's shoulders on the ground. They wrestle on the "pit" (not sure what the appropriate word is) of sawdust. The winner always brushes the sawdust off the back of the loser, which I thought was just adorable and a real show of sportsmanship.

 

The schwingfest we went to included the extra entertainment of an alphorn player, a flag thrower, and a group of yodelers!! It was so much swiss fun rolled up into one day!

team golf event

Our quarterly team event was golfing. It was a lot of fun. Only a few of us had ever golfed before as it is not very popular in Switzerland, which made it quite comical.

 

cinque terre

The next (and last) stop on my busy few weeks of visitors was Cinque Terre, Italy with Matt & Lloyd. When I did my Eurotrip after college with 4 girlfriends, this was one of our favorite stops so I was eager to go back.

 

We took the train from Lauterbrunnen early Friday morning. We had about an hour and a half in Milan between trains, so we stopped for lunch and some vino on a park bench outside the train station. This was the first bottle of several bottles of wine we would consume that day.

 

 

We stayed in Monterosso, which is the one town of the five which I didn't visit when I was in Cinque Terre 7 years ago.

 

Friday evening we went on a boat tour. It was wonderful. We sipped prosecco and chatted with the other 4 people on our tour. It was great to see the towns from the water which I hadn't done before. It's just so beautiful there!

 

We stopped in one of the towns for tapas and lots of white wine. We ate sardines and mussels and other super fresh seafood which was amazing.

 

We even convinced our tour guide to play some of our music, which included "Born in the USA". Needless to say, we were the life of the party on our boat.

 

 

After the boat tour, we went to a wine bar with a Canadian couple we met on the boat tour. We had wine, spritzers, and lemoncello (even though I said I would never drink that again...I still don't like it).

 

 

Saturday, we hiked from Monterosso all the way to Manarolo via Vernazza and Corniglia. Due to floods and mudslides a few years ago, a lot of the normal trails are still closed. Therefore the hike from Corniglia to Manarolo took 1.5 hours (and included a steep climb) versus the normal 30-40 minute trail. The views all day were breathtaking.

 

It rained on and off all day. This resulted in our rain jackets being saunas and not being able to tell what was sweat and what was rain.

 

The boys left Sunday morning, but I still had the day to spend in Cinque Terre. So I took the ferry to Riomagiorre, the one town we didn't make it to on Saturday, and the town I stayed in the last time I was there.

 

This town is just absolutely beautiful. Unfortunately, it seemed that the tourists had doubled since I was here last time, but its easy to see why people want to come here.

 

 

After walking around the town, I decided to try to find this lookout that my girls and I spent an evening at 7 years before. This lookout was the home to one of our favorite and most memorable nights of our Eurotrip. And...I found it! It was one of those times which was perfect for reflection,  sitting on a bench that I had sat on 7 years ago (almost to the day).

 

The rest of the afternoon I spent in the garden of the hotel, reading amidst the lemon trees.

 

The train from Milan back to Switzerland was already fully booked when I went to book it, so I had already planned to spend the night in Milan and get back to Switzerland first thing Monday morning. I didn't go out and see any of the city. For the second time in a few days, all I saw of Milan was the train station: