I love that I have opportunities to travel with my grandchildren! This time I took a brother and sister who wished for a trip to Switzerland, a chance to ride trains and to go paragliding. The trip, Best of Switzerland by Rail, is organized by https://www.vacationsbyrail.com which filled two of their wishes.
We flew from Salt Lake City to Zurich and begin our train travel on July 1 until July 10th.
Our hotel in Zurich. Each hotel on the trip was excellent! Our rooms were will appointed and the breakfast buffets were always great!
View from our room at Glockenhof Hotel.
Since our plane arrived at 8 AM we had plenty of time to explore a bit of Zurich before our welcome dinner where we met the rest of our 41 travel companions. This was a sizable group for our tour guide to manage getting us on and off the various trains, counting us each time, etc I think he sometimes felt like he was trying to corral cats. But he did a great job getting us where we needed to be when we needed to be there while showing great concern for those who had mobility issues. He carried a Swiss flag on a stick which we followed as we walked in a group.
We were each given a Swiss Pass which gave us free travel on the various trains as well as entrance to a variety of venues. I checked later and discovered it retails at about $600 for 15 days. We were also provided with tickets to major venues all of which definitely made the cost of the tour reasonable.
Our first day was spent training to St. Gallen which is a delightful town/hamlet with "a remarkably well-preserved Old Town with breathtaking views .." old buildings, beautiful with amazing architecture. Our local tour guide recommended that we try the brauschweiger and the 'biber. The braunschweiger was a tasty sausage while This sweet specialty was once called "Birnenzelten," which later became "Biberzelten," to end up Biber or Biberli for short. The sweet pastry is actually a kind of decorated ginger bread made from honey dough with a white almond filling. The Biber belongs to the town of St.Gallen just like the twin towers of its famous church. It was not my favorite as I found it very strong but neverthelass fun to try.
The Unesco World Heritage Site Baroque Cathedral was amazing! The library which contains thousands of books was beautiful! I was so pleased to learn that they are in the process of digitizing the collection. To view digitized content of the library go to www.e-codices.ch It is amazing and the work goes on! I found this hard to link but when I typed it in the search engine it came up just fine.
It has been said that a picture is worth a 1000 words. I do not think there could be enough pictures to adequately describe all we saw in St. Gallen. It is truly amazing! The intricate details of the cathedral and the library defy description. You just have to be there and even then it is indescribable.
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