Since returning from my LDS Mission in Switzerland 25+ years ago, I have always had the dream of one day returning, and experiencing that beautiful country again, with my wife. Last month, we were able to accomplish this life-time dream not only together, but with our children. Here's a how to list for anyone wanting to make a similar trip.
Step 1. Plan Your European Itinerary: Switzerland Every Day. Skip Everyplace Else. As described in David McCullough's wonderful book Mornings on Horseback, when Theodoore Roosevelt was a young lad, his family did a "grand tour" of Europe. They spent a year on the continent, and saw all of the sights and experienced all of the experiences that foreign visitors were expected to see and experience. But at the end, McCullough assures us, they loved Switzerland the best. Mark Twain expressed a similar sentiment. Near the end of his life, which included writing travel books about Europe and other world destinations, he was heard to say: "I must get back to Switzerland."
Now, ask yourself this question: Do you have the time or the means to spend a year on a grand tour of Europe? No? Then why see anything other than the favorite place of those who do: Switzerland?
Besides, everything worth seeing in Europe is in Switzerland. Want to hang out with snooty French speaking folk? Go to French Speaking Switzerland. Just like France but without the overcrowded dangerous cities. Want to experience the landscapes of Italy? Try Bellinzona. There's a bunch of castles, and it's just like Italy, except it's in Switzerland, so its clean and efficient, with trains that run on time, as opposed to being grimy and corrupt, where the trains run into each other and kill people (true story) because the funds to improve them were diverted to the local mob or something, like in the real Italy.
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2016-07-14/station-master-says-delays-caused-confusion-before-crash
Italian - and French speaking Switzerland are sort of like the Epcott versions of Italy and France: the Pizza tastes just as great but you don't feel like your taking your life in your hands if you use a public restroom or spend the night. National Geographic Author Andrew Evans puts it like this, in point 5 of his article "66 Tips to Swiss Bliss": "Tacking on Switzerland as a two-day detour to your European trip to France, Germany and Italy is a serious mistake. Rather, see 'all' of Europe by visiting Switzerland’s four distinct corners. This country is a destination unto itself and deserves the time and attention." http://digitalnomad.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/31/66-tips-to-swiss-bliss/
Look, I've seen pictures of the Eiffel Tower, and I'm sure it's lovely in real life. But I'm also sure, and this is a simple matter of mathematics and quantum physics, that a day spent in Paris is also a day NOT spent overlooking the Lauterbrunnen Valley, or traipsing through Appenzellerland. And if you've come all the way to Europe, why would you NOT want to spend your time looking down upon the Lauterbrunnen Valley or traipsing through Appenzellerland? I mean really. If you could go to Middle Earth, would you head towards Mordor or Rivendell? The Shire or the boggy marshes?
I suppose, if you must see other countries while in Europe, that a visit to Germany's Bavarian alps, or Austria, would be worth the effort. But go anywhere else, and you are likely to experience the sad fate and trauma of this little girl, who climbed the Church tower in Frankfurt to look for her beloved Swiss alps, only to realize, "you can't see the mountains" from the Frankfurt Church tower:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5T61jTQflc&list=PLEE962F6DCB04344C&index=11
What a sad and moving scene. Don't let this same tragic fate happen to you. If you are going to Europe, stick to places where you can see the mountains!
Step 3. Know Your Miles-Earning Credit Cards. This only helps, of course, if you actually pay your cards down quickly after using them, so the offsetting interest doesn't take away your savings. But if you are in a position to do that, travel points can be very helpful. We liked the Capital One Venture Card, which is fairly simple to use, and isn't tied into any particular airline or hotel chain. You earn points for your purchases, and you can use those points to erase travel expenditures from your invoice. You can do this after the fact, so you don't have to jump through any special hoops to buy your tickets using your points or anything like that. Just pay for your tickets, or hotel rooms or whatever, using your card, and then call in or go online and apply any points you have on hand to reducing the charge of those items. Easy peasy. We were able to shave off quite a bit of money from our airfare costs using these points, after we had bought the tickets but long before we actually even left. The Venture Card is also handy to use overseas, as it is chip enabled, and thus valid for use abroad, and doesn't charge any transaction fees when you use it overseas.
Step 4. Know Your Low-cost Air Carriers. One of the reasons we even thought about going to Switzerland was because we learned in December of some incredible airfare rates, for tickets direct from Las Vegas to Stockholm Sweden, for less than $215.00, which were being offered on Norwegian Air, at Norwegian.com, in May and early June.
http://www.norwegian.com/us
In addition to Norwegian, Iceland Air apparently has some very competitive rates to Europe as well at the moment. Our travel dates didn't coincide with these great rates in both directions, as we traveled back home after the rates had bumped up, but still, the trip over there was cheap enough for us to afford the trip back, and even the return fares were really pretty decent all things considered. Once we had arrival dates in Stockholm, finding inter-European flights (we went with SAS) wasn't too bad. The round-trip was still far cheaper than anything I was able to find with a single airline on expedia.com at the time of our booking, and was lower than flights available at Expedia with much longer or more stops. One word of warning if you do it this way though, as opposed to booking with the same airline: This meant we had to go get our one checked bag and re-check ourselves, and it, in at the Stockholm Airport, for the second leg of our flight. When our Norwegian flight left 1.5 hours late, I was pretty nervous about whether we would make our connecting flight. It turned out fine (the plane didn't arrive as late as it left, and the second flight was late too), but still: if you aren't booking on the same airline that will have to accommodate you if one leg of your journey is late, give yourself a few hours' cushion between anticipated landing and the take-off for that connecting flight.
-- TIPS FOR FLYING:
-I never understood the logic of the U-Shaped travel pillow until I tried to sleep on the 10 hour flight from Las Vegas to Stockholm. But the logic becomes very clear once you are trying to sleep sitting almost upright on a tightly packed airplane and the heaviness of your own head, unsupported, keeps you from being able to do so. I bought one at the airport before getting on the flight home. Worth every penny.
- Your flight may just have plugs under the seat to allow you to keep your phone or laptop charged while you are underway. Ours did but I didn't realize this until the trip home. Would have saved me the weight of the portable charger I brought along had I known this beforehand.
- If you leave in the evening and arrive at your destination in the evening, you'll find that you get a really good night sleep upon your arrival, as you probably didn't sleep terrifically fantastic on the flight. You'll wake up the next morning on the new time schedule without any real jetlag issues. We arrived in the evening both going over and coming back and this worked out really, really, well. Otherwise, try not to sleep when you first arrive, so your first night's sleep will get you on the right schedule and past your jetlag.
Step 5. Don't Delay Getting Your Kids' Passports. If your children don't have passports, you'll want to get them sooner rather than later. The process is sure to make you need therapy. So plan ahead for that cost. Here's how it works. Go online to find the phone number for scheduling appointments at a local post office. You'll need to find a date and time when both you, and your minor children, and your spouse, can all be there together. You know, to make sure no one's going to start some international child custody battle. Once you've found a few possible dates (because how hard is that for any of us, really, to find a weekday when we and our kids and our spouse can all be at the same place at the same time during working hours) call that number. It will be busy. Then call again several times until you get a recording telling you that all of their operators are now busy. Wait on the line until you realize you weren't put on hold, but were just hung up on. Wake up early the next morning and call first thing for several minutes in a row until you get through to an actual human being. They will schedule an appointment for you for three weeks out, at a post office on the other side of town. Three weeks later, the evening before your appointment, you'll get a voice-mail informing you that no one is available tomorrow at the office where you booked your appointment, so you'll have to book another appointment instead. The person who leaves this message won't leave their name or their phone number, so you'll just have to start the whole process over again. Also, the person who leaves this message won't bother to inform you that the reason no one will be at the post office tomorrow to handle your appointment is that there is a passport fair going on at the local scout office, and all of the workers will be there, where you could be too if she bothered to inform you of that fact. Start the process over. Then find out from a friend's cousin that the local clerk's office does this without an appointment. Go by to check this rumour out and find it isn't true any more. Then find out through another cousin's friend's nephew that the Henderson City Clerk's Office offers passport services without an appointment. Why a municipal office is able to handle this federal function better than a federal post office is a question it is best not to contemplate. Show up on the first day of Spring break, a half an hour early, at the Henderson City Clerk's Office, which is not even where you live and is 45 minutes away from your home. Sign in. Wait for 3 hours because of all the people who got there even earlier than you and signed in ahead of you. Fill out the forms and voila, the Henderson City Clerk will send in your kids' passport applications to the Federal Government for you. See how easy that was? No wonder our Federal Government is so universally admired.
Step 6. Know Your Exchange Rates. One of the reasons I always considered a trip to Switzerland to be prohibitively expensive was that the exchange rate was, for decades, fairly ridiculous, costing perhaps up to $2.30 or more for every 1.00 Swiss Frank, such that (as the two currencies are roughly equivalent in purchasing power, but Switzerland is expensive anyway), a hotel room would cost an American more than twice as much as the already fairly steep price. Switzerland has not adopted the Euro, but the exchange rate with the USD has improved substantially for U.S. travelers in recent years, with the two currencies having recently come to hover near each other in value. Still, it's worth looking at the trending before you travel, to decide whether you want to reserve or pay now for some of your anticipated expenses. Also, once you are in the country, you'll often be asked by the card reader whether to pay either in CHF (the Swiss currency, CHocolate Franks) or USD. I always assumed the USD option had merchant processing fees attached and went with the CHF, which was typically a smaller number; but its good to be able to do some quick math if you are making a larger purchase, to know what your USD is actually going to look like on your credit card bill. Otherwise, if you want certainty, you can pick the USD option righ then. So have a website handy on your smartphone for looking at the rates. Google's search engine can be used as an exchange rate calculator automatically if you just type in CHF USD Exchange Rate. Also, it's a great idea to find a major branch of your bank that offers monetary exchanges, and get some CHF to have on hand before you go, so you'll have some CHF Franks in your wallet upon your arrival. You'll want this real money for some purchases, as not every location accepts cards, and sometimes paying in bills is just handier. Also, if your credit card or ATM card charges you transaction fees for foreign purchases, you'll want to use cash (or find a card that does not charge such fees).
Step 7. Brush Up on Your German. After slogging through a few lessons on FluentU, and making my family suffer through a couple of examples of incredibly depressing German cinema on Netflix, I finally discovered what I consider to be the perfect way to remember a language you used to know how to speak. It's called "Easy German" and it's available on Youtube. Each episode consists of man in the street interviews in a city in Germany, with subtitles in both English and German. The German subtitles correct any German that wasn't spoken correctly by a local dialect user or foreign visitor. Watching a few of these videos was perfect for helping my mind click back into a German gear which was still in there somewhere, and for remembering the basic vocabulary of conversational Deutsch. The videos are brief and fun to watch and don't give you the feeling of doing homework. There's also a related video series, without subtitles, in which the host answers viewer questions. I found that sister series really helpful for building my confidence that yes, I could understand this language still, even without the crutch of pausing to look at the subtitles and remember or learn the meaning of every single word.
Here's an episode of the easy German show:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFv-YsDi-7A
And of the Viewer questions show:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCnjm1Sgvgo
Step 8. Know Your Swiss Railway Discount Passes. The Swiss Travel Pass allows you to jump on board almost any train, ship, or gondola in the country, without getting a ticket or a reservation beforehand. Even the handful of pricey touristy rides which are excluded from being free (the final leg of the journey to the Jungfraujoch for example) are half price with the pass, a discount which can substantially pay the value of the entire pass. Plus, it gets you into every museum in the country (which includes all of the castles) for free. This is a great benefit if you want the flexibility of popping into a castle or local museum for a couple of hours on a rainy morning, and then heading up to the alps later, or taking a boat ride, when the weather clears up, if that's what the forecast calls for. Two hours in the museum during the rainstorm is a lot easier to justify if you walked in for free, as opposed to spending so much money for tickets that you feel you need to stay for hours to justify the price. Plus, if you are travelling with (your own) children under 16 years old, your card will allow them to get a family card junior pass (for free or really cheap), such that they essentially go almost everywhere truly for free. The Swiss Travel Pass can be purchased in various allotments (i.e., 4 day, 8 day, etc., beginning on the first day of use).
If you think of Switzerland as one big giant version of Disneyland (which actually makes a weird kind of sense) and you think of your Swiss Travel Pass as your parkhopper pass for 8 days in Switzerdisneyland, the price of one of these passes will suddenly look extremely reasonable (especially in comparison to an actual 3 day Disney parkhopper ticket).
Nevertheless: they don't make sense for everyone. My family didn't buy them because we rented a car, rather than travelling by train, and so we weren't sure they would pay for themselves. However, we did buy half-fare passes (only available for a 30 day period minimum, but still cheaper than an 8 day Swiss travel pass) to reduce the cost of mountain railways and gondolas and all the other means of transport you are going to end up taking to get yourself onto the alps even after travelling there by car. This allowed our under 16 year old son to get a junior pass travel card to go everywhere by train or ship or gondola for free, for only 30 CHF, which, combined with a couple of our train rides, such as our trip up the Jungfraujoch, or the train ride to car free Zermatt, meant the 1/2-fare pass more than paid for itself pretty quickly. Other railway pass options include regional cards, but these are almost as much as the Swiss Travel Pass, so they really only make sense if you are limiting yourself exclusively to the Luzern area, or the Berner Oberland area, or the Zermatt area. There's also a pass for travelers arriving from a foreign border to travel at a reduced rate while in Switzerland.
All of these various discount passes are well explained at this site, which includes links to purchase the tickets online from the Swiss Railway System: http://www.myswissalps.com/train/ticketspasses.
The parent site is also a great website for all kinds of general information about travelling to Switzerland. Questions asked in the forums will typically be answered really quickly:
http://www.myswissalps.com/
Step 9. Reserve an Apartment: Better and Cheaper than a Hotel. Long before Airbnb introduced the concept to Americans, the Europeans discovered vacation apartment rentals as a great way to travel, and not just for beach-houses. They are far, far, less expensive, per day, than a hotel, especially if you are travelling with a larger group of people, and would have to book more than one hotel room. Indeed, I found that some of the cheapest hotel accommodations I could find for my family at 1 star hotels were still far more expensive per night than a 3 star vacation apartment. I would highly recommend using this site to find your apartment:
http://chalet.myswitzerland.com/holiday-rentals/
It allows you to search by region, city, price, star ranking, and other criteria, such as whether or not the apartment has a washing machine (yes please) or allows pets (no thank you, I have allergies and don't want to stay someplace where a dog was living last week). Disclaimer: A lot of apartments are available from Saturday to Saturday, with only Saturday as an available arrival/departure date. So if you plan your travels with that in mind, you'll have more choices than we did.
Our family of 7 ended up staying for 8 out of our 10-nights on the top floor of this chalet on the upper outskirts of Grindelwald, which came with its own kitchen and family room, two bathrooms, one with a bathtub/shower, along with three bedrooms accommodating 2 beds each, and a couple of extra beds in some storage space off of the family room:
It was very gemuetlich, ranked only 3 stars and was therefore fairly inexpensive but still very nice (it was perfectly clean and as or more spacious inside as some more expensive apartments--the furnishings were unspectacular and you had to walk downstairs into a basement area to use the washing machine). It had a raclette oven and a fondue maker and an ironing board inside, along with a wifi hotspot, none of which had been advertised, and was loaded with brochures and a big binder full of information on local attractions. It also had a great somewhat separate entryway to hang coats, hats, and umbrellas and luggage.
The landlord only spoke German, which was fine by me as it gave me a chance to put those Easy German Youtube videos to use and I really enjoyed speaking to her in German and learning about her life and adult children and grandchildren who were all still living in the Grindelwald area. She told us on our first meeting that, in a couple of days, the local cattle owners would be walking their cows past the chalet, on their road up to the higher pastures and we should watch for them from the balcony, and she explained to us how the process worked of deciding which part of the town would walk up their cows at what time, how few cows most locals actually owned, etc. She was a little bit komish: she wanted us to compost our compostable garbage even though the lid she gave us for her outside compost bucket didn't fit, so we eventually had to find a rock to keep it from being knocked over by local wildlife after that happened one evening; and she wanted us to use the local tax-redeemable garbage bags, but didn't have any on hand such that she said we should look for them ourselves at the local Migros. And we had to walk down the hill a bit to recycle the stuff that we weren't supposed to either throw away or compost. My sense is that her son, who lives on the bottom floor, generally deals with the tourists, and is probably more aware of what it is and isn't reasonable to ask a renter to do (by way of providing any bags yourself that you want us to use) but he was away that week. So whatever. Rather than be annoyed, I found interacting with this lady added a lot of color to our trip, and it was interesting to learn about some of these details of daily life in the area. That's what travelling is for, isn't it, as well as life? to collect stories.
Having a central location for 8 nights and not having to pack every day made everything much easier. After all, everything in Switzerland is fairly reachable by car or train within two or three hours of Grindelwald, which is basically in the middle of the country (although Interlaken would have been a better access point for drives in either direction, the housing there was a little more pricey, or less was available). And given the unpredictability of the weather, you don't necessarily want too tight of an itinerary anyway.
Step 10. Know Your Swiss Road Signs. If you rent a vehicle, some things to know. The Swiss drive on the same side of the road as Americans, the right (aka correct) side. Since it was the Brits who invented Alpine tourism, more so than even the Swiss, maybe that's why train travel is so popular. When travelling by car, you will often see signs directing you to the same destination via different routes. It's helpful to know the difference: The green signs will take you on a quicker tollroad, similar to an American freeway in its design. The blue signs will take you on a surface road or scenic route. So travel by green signs at night or when getting to your destination quickly is more important to you than a scenic journey. If you rent a vehicle in Switzerland, it should have a sticker on the front windshield with a green tollway sign on it, allowing the vehicle to travel on the toll roads. This is important to know if your GPS tries to save you money by directing you away from tollroads. If you have the sticker, ignore your GPS's advice and travel by greenway to get there faster.
Speaking of your GPS, I highly recommend getting one when you rent your vehicle. We didn't but were upgraded in what must have been a slow week at the rental counter. Or maybe they were nice because I spoke German with the people at the counter and they thought maybe I'd come back again. Having a GPS in the vehicle was fantastic. First of all, the computerized GPS lady's voice spoke in German. I'm not sure exactly why, but this made me feel like James Bond, and with my Bond girl wife in the next seat, somehow ignoring the fact that I was in a minivan with my 5 children sitting behind me. I think I was subconsciously referencing a scene in Tomorrow Never Dies when the computerized car voice speaks to Brosnan in a heavy German accent.
More importantly, the GPS will keep you from using the map app on your phone, thus keeping your smartphone from racking up enormous data roaming fees, especially after that international plan you paid for from your carrier doesn't last nearly as many days as you had anticipated, limiting your smartphone use to wifi hotspots. Also, for some reason, some of the map apps want to give you directions in miles, instead of kilometers, which is useless when your odomoter doesn't track miles.
Parking in the cities isn't bad as long as you know where to look. Find the Bahnhof, there's always a parking garage nearby, which, in the big cities, will be located underground. Look for the blue sign with a large P underneath a slanted line, indicating covered parking. You'll have to pay for parking, but the rates aren't too bad.
Step 11: Learn How to Use Your DSLR. Got a Canon Rebel you picked up at Costco a few years ago but have never really learned what all the knobs and buttons do? Yeah, me too. But Switzerland was worth honing my photography skills for. At the very least, learn the basics of aperture mode, so you can take pictures of your kids in front of the Matterhorn, and both the Matterhorn and your kids will be in focus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmn3K-06YTg
Learning how to use a gopro is a great idea as well, and can inspire you to less passive activities on your trip, with the fisheyed photos and videos giving you a more interesting photographic perspective. But be careful out there. I recently read an article indicating that more people now die while taking selfies than die from shark attacks.
Step 12: Bone up on your English and American Lit.
As English is not one of Switzerland's 4 official languages, you might think it an odd place to hunt down literary references from the English-speaking world. But you'd be wrong. Much of Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad is set in Switzerland, and today you can hike the Mark Twain trail on the Rigi, following in a few hours the route he humorously described as requiring him several days to ascend in that book. Or watch the sunrise from the Rigi, as he kept failing to do, as he also described. Frankenstein was written in Switzerland, near Lake Geneva, overlooking Mount Blanc, during an unusually dark and foreboding winter, caused by a volcanic eruption that disrupted weather patterns worldwide. And one of Byron's famous poems, The Prisoner of Chillon, was based on the true story of a famous prisoner of that castle, and in 2016, the 200th anniversary of the poem's publication, the castle was full of displays with references to Byron's poem, as well as to his travels throughout the Berner Oberland. My above-reference to the Lauterbrunnen Valley as equivalent to Rivendell isn't something I just came up with on my own: Tolkien had enjoyed hiking in Lauterbrunnen, and stated that his Rivendell was based on that valley of waterfalls. Comparing Tolkien's own paintings of Rivendell with photos of the Lauterbrunnen makes the resemblance really clear. And the Lonely Mountain clearly looks a lot more like the Matterhorn than like anything in Tolkien's England.
Step 13: Keep Your Itinerary Highly Flexible, and Know Your Webcam and Weather URLs, So you can Plan Your Days Based on the Weather. The main reason to go to Switzerland is to see the scenery. But there's a reason that scenery is so green and beautiful: Rain. Lots and lots of it, all year round. Except when there's snow. Rain brings out the beauty, but it also blocks the beautiful Bergen.
So you'll need to have an itinerary that's flexible enough to allow you to get up in the alps to hike and ride the rodelbahns and zipline and take pictures on the sunny days, with other alternative activities (castles, museums, Beatenberg, Trummelbach falls, oldtowns and cathedrals) planned for the rainy days. Then, you'll want to check tomorrow's weather every evening. And also check mountaintop webcams in the morning, before finalizing your plans for the day (it doesn't do you much good to have "partly cloudy" weather, if those few clouds are right on top of the Schilthorn the day you want to visit). And if the forecast only calls for two sunny days in a week, do you really want to be committed to taking the Jungfrajoch on one of the rainy days, and then traipsing around Bern or Gruyeres on the next day, when its sunny and Herrlich up in the alps? I don't think so. So keep your plans flexible and your weather and webcam sites handy. This is also an excellent reason for choosing a vacation rental rather than moving to a new hotel in a new part of the country each evening: it gives you a central location from which to take the best possible day trips depending on the weather. And if that rental is in your favorite region anyway, central Switzerland or the Jungfrau region or near Zermatt, whatever your personal preference may be, so much the better.
I found Wetter.com to be among the more reliable weather forecast sites. You can type in any city, and it will give you a three or seven day forecast, if you request that as well, showing expected conditions in the morning, at midday, and in the evening and at night. The weather in the mountains can be fairly unpredictable, so trying to plan more than a day or two ahead can be pretty difficult, but these morning, midday, and evening forecasts were remarkably prescient, at least when checked no more than a couple of days beforehand, and were always spot on as of the night before. I would have planned our Luzern day differently, and gotten myself up onto the Rigi in the morning, to wait for the clouds to clear, if I had had more faith in the Wetter.com forecast, which said all the rain and clouds were going to be gone by that afternoon. Still, seeing the mountains from the lake, instead of vice-versa, was nice too. (Switzerland is usually just the opposite, with morning sunshine giving way to afternoon haze and clouds that block obscure the mountain views, but real rain, as opposed to haze, can have a different pattern.)
http://www.wetter.com/wetter_aktuell/wettervorhersage/3_tagesvorhersage/schweiz/interlaken/CH0CH1864.html
The Vierwaldstaettersee in the a.m. of June 9, from Kuessnacht, with the Rigi covered in clouds: a rainy morning in and near Luzern, just as Wetter.com had predicted.
Some handy webcams:
http://www.bergfex.com/jungfrau-maennlichen-wengen/webcams/c4692/
http://schilthorn.ch/en/Info/Schilthorn_Live/Livecams
http://www.zermatt.ch/en/Webcams/Gornergrat-3-089-m
Step 14. Have Fun Dreaming and Planning.
Kev Reynolds has perhaps the best job on earth. He takes people hiking in the alps, during the summer, and gives lectures and writes books about it for British publisher Cicerone Press, during the winter.
http://www.cicerone.co.uk/product/index.cfm/cid/24/catalogue/switzerland
I didn't actually go on any of the hikes I read about in his books, Walking in the Bernese Oberland, or Tour of the Jungfrau Region, because late snows meant the two or three routes I had bookmarked weren't passable during my June trip. But I enjoyed the experience of reading through portions of these books before our trip, for its own sake, and the alternate, more difficult, route we had to take from Maennlichen to Kleine Scheidegg was breathtaking. I also made it to a couple of spots I only knew to look for because of perusing these volumes beforehand: including Oeschinensee, a lake I had never heard of before, which ended up being the whole family's favorite day. We went rowboating and rodelbahn riding instead of hiking while we were there, but I wouldn't have even known to look for this spot if Reynolds' book hadn't mentioned that posters and photos don't do it justice, and it must be seen for oneself to be believed. He was right.
So read guidebooks. Get a Fodors Switzerland. Order one of the beautifully artistic official government swiss topo hiking maps and pin it up in your den. Facebook friend the Swiss railway system. Watch youtube videos of Freizyt TV, a Swiss-German tv show that encourages weekend ausflugs, https://vimeo.com/135867506, and do whatever else it takes to get mentally prepared for a great Swiss adventure.
You may find that planning your trip is almost as fun as being there.
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