Wednesday, October 8, 2025

A dinner with friends and an (unplanned) extra day

We arrived back in Zurich in time to meet up with some friends for dinner. We had returned our rental car so we took the train from the airport to the main train station in Zurich. We had the SBB app and the Half Fare card which were easy to use and we managed the train journey just fine. Our problem was in figuring out where our friends' hotel was located in relation to the station, but we soon had it figured out and were able to enjoy dinner with them.  

We returned to our hotel, the Radisson Blu at the airport, to figure out our strategy for the following day. We did not realize until 48 hours before the flight that the airline had changed our flight to one day later than I had orignially booked. In looking back through their emails to me about flight changes and layover changes, I did eventually find the email that mentioned other changes including the additional day. I called the airline reservations line and the young man was very nice but couldn't get us conveniently rebooked to where we needed to go on such short notice. Sooo we had an extra day. We have been to Zurich previously so we wanted to do something outside the city. We finally decided to take a bus tour to the Rheinfalls and the village of Stein am Rhein.

 The next morning we took the train to the city again and tried to orient ourselves more successfully than the day before. We had to ask for help from a young man in the ticket office who nicely gave us directions to the tour bus area. Once we arrived and everyone was on the bus, we left for the Rheinfalls. I have to admit that I had put the falls on my "B" list of things to see, but the sheer volume of water going over the falls was pretty impressive. Even though the falls are not high, the volume and force of the water make up for it. We walked up and down the stairs to the various viewing platforms and even had time for a quick beverage before boarding the bus again. 

The medeival village of Stein am Rhein was next on the tour. This is a charming village with lots of half-timbered houses and beautiful wall painting on the exterior of the buildings. Our tour guide pointed out some of the details of various buildings and then let us explore on our own. We wandered about looking at all the shops and buildings before stopping at Il Gelato. Our tour guide said it was the best gelato in town and one look told me the banana gelato was handmade. The owner said he makes it himself from fresh bananas. I could tell it was handmade because it wasn't yellow, but kind of a gray/beige and if you look closely you can see the tiny black seeds. A tour guide in Rome gave me that tip years ago. My husband and I took our gelato to a bench by the river to relax and enjoy the view before boarding the bus for our return to Zurich. We packed our bags and got everything ready for our flight the next day.

 The next morning we walked the 2 minutes to the terminal from our hotel (so convenient) and went to check in and drop our bags. The Zurich airport is unlike other airports I have been to, as the airlines share check in desks and remove their signage at the end of their shift and then replace it when they arrive the next day. In the meantime, other airlines take over that desk and put up their signage. Maybe this happens in other airports but this was the first time I had seen it done. So we arrived at Check-in 2, level 2, row 1 which is exactly where Delta check-in should have been, but the only desks were Singapore Air and Qatar Air! Eventually other travelers arrived for check-in with Delta but the desk agents didn't arrive and start checking people in until almost 2 hours before the flight. We still had to go through security and another passport check so we felt a bit rushed at this point in spite of arriving early. We finally made it to the gate area and bought a sandwich to eat since we had skipped breakfast in favor of getting to the aiport early. 

Our flight was delayed taking off by 20 minutes which left us 1-1/2 hours to deplane, go through customs and make it to our gate at JFK airport. The customs area at JFK was jammed full of people. We have Global Entry but only one person was working that line so it still took a while to get through. We made it to our gate just as the plane was boarding, thank goodness. We had one more connecting flight in order to get home so we couldn't miss our plane in New York or we'd be spending the night in Utah and trying to get home the next day.  That would have added two extra days to the trip and my husband had to work so we had to make that next connection. Finally we landed at our home airport at 12:30am, found our car in the parking garage where our kids had left it, and headed home to finally fall into bed. 

Hohenzollern photos

Hohenzollern Castle
Long passageway to entrance
Ornate brass chalice
Interior room
Exterior

Hohenzollern Castle

I have often seen beautiful photos of Hohenzollern perched high on a hill, looking so impressive and large. Once I realized that Hohenzollern was not far from Zurich it was immediately on my list of places to see on this trip. We made the trip from Colmar, crossing the German border and arriving early in the afternoon. The castle is the ancestral seat of the Hohenzollern family, which produced the kings of Prussia and the German emporers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It fell into ruin and was restored in the 19th century. 

 There is a long covered passageway as you make your way up to the castle itself - quite an impressive entrance. Once you reach the castle complex you have the choice of entering the interior rooms, the church, the restaurant and gift shop, or walking the walls of the outer bastions. We opted to visit the interior rooms first as it was raining off and on and was quite chilly. We saw many rooms which had beautiful ceilings, paintings, and sculpture as well as antiques and artifacts. I think our favorite was a large brass piece. It was highly decorated and we could not figure out its function. We thought perhaps a timepiece or a music box but we sought out one of the staff and she said it was a chalice. She didn't think it had ever been used but was a symbol of the family's wealth and power. 

 We visited the churches and then continued on to the walls surrounding the castle. Unfortunately for us,the rain and clouds obscured much of the view but there were statues to see of the Prussian kings and the German emporers. After our time outside we were cold and hungry so we decided to have a somewhat early dinner in the castle restaurant. My husband opted for a burger and I ordered a chicken dish. My husband said his burger was good and my chicken breast was deliciously seasoned and moist. We shared an apple strudel for dessert and returned to our car for the drive to Tubingen where we would stay the night. We stopped at a turnout on the road and managed to get a photo of the castle as the clouds had finally lifted a bit.

Tuesday, October 7, 2025

Colmar and Chateau du Haut-Koenigsbourg photos

La Maison des Tetes
Little Venice
Chateau du Haut-Koenigsbourg

Monday, October 6, 2025

Switzerland 2025 - Colmar, France and Chateau du Haut-Koenigsbourg

We had visited Colmar once before as a day trip from our Rhine River cruise in 2013 and decided to take a trip over the border to France to visit this lovely city once again. We stayed in a historic hotel, part of the Relais and Chateaux group, called La Maison des Tetes which literally means the house of heads. Now you may be envisioning some scary place but the "heads" are just sculpted heads decorating the front of the building. Every day the city walking tours would stop to admire the hotel facade. The hotel is located in the pedestrian zone and near all the historic sites including "Little Venice". Since we had previously visited the Unterlinden museum with the famous Isenheim altarpiece as well as other sites, we just wandered the streets looking in shop windows, strolled through Little Venice and the covered marketplace. The one thing we didn't do was to visit the Bartholdi museum and I'm a bit sorry we didn't see it. The weather was rainy and cold and I was glad to find a Starbucks nearby for a nice hot latte. We drove from Colmar to visit the Chateau du Haut-Koenigsbourg the next day. It had been raining earlier and we actually drove up into the clouds surrounding the castle. When we walked up to the castle entrance we couldn't see more than the gate in front of us due to the cloud cover hanging over the castle. We never let that kind of thing keep us from enjoying a visit and it actually was rather a cool atmospere. Once inside we saw a drawbridge, a tower staircase, lots of weaponry including several cannon, colorful wall murals, and lots of ceramic stoves. I always think these ceramic heating stoves were a great idea and how much warmth it would give the room, you just would have to be super careful that no one touched it! After our castle visit we returned to Colmar via country roads through vineyards, farmland, and small villages.

Sunday, September 28, 2025

Chateaux photos

 

Vineyards at Chateau d’Aigle 


Chateau d’Aigle

 

                                                                                                                   

Chateau de Menthon-Saint-Bernard

Switzerland 2025 Chateau de Chillon

The Chateau de Chillon is a very good castle to visit, whether it’s your first tour of a castle or your hundredth tour. The signage says it’s the most historically significant site in all of Switzerland. We did the self-guided tour and saw wonderful vaulted ceilings, a prison, murals, antique and medieval furnishings, old weaponry - you name it, Chillon has it. We did the self-guided tour with a map and had seen most of the castle (or so we thought) when we realized we were at station #24 and there were over 40 stations to visit! There are centuries of history, stories of famous prisoners, and lakefront escapes from conquering armies, what more could you want? You get all of this and free 2 hour parking, which is a rarity in Montreux as far as we could tell. It was definitely worth a visit. 

Chateau de Chillon
Prison and storage cellar