We’d gone to Italy for the
soul and were now heading to Zurich for friendship—to visit one of my very
oldest friends, married to a Swiss. After leaving Bologna, we connected through
Milano, the station just as you would expect for this fashionable city, grand
and elegant.
I haven’t mentioned yet the
Man in Seat Sixty-One, www.seat61.com. This
website has proved invaluable over several train (and ferry) trips, and I can’t
recommend it enough. Based on his advice, I buy the tickets online and have
never had a problem…only great adventures.
Milan is near the border and
soon we crossed into Switzerland…and began climbing, our glued to the window.
This is picture-postcard land, little need for words.
We continued our
scenery-watching in the dining car, complete with white tablecloths and even
bigger windows. Perfect for sipping espresso and watching the mountain villages
and lakes pass by.
My friend met us at the
Zurich railway station, spacious and orderly, and drove us to her home
overlooking the lake. Carol’s village was a
steep walk uphill so later we piled back in the car to visit it and her office,
from which she publishes the monthly Historic
Motor Racing News. She is quite a woman, but that is another story (perhaps for one of my books)!
The next day we visited the
Old Town and had a fabulous lunch at LaZoupa, where her husband, the company’s founder, arranged a delicious tasting menu out of their international range of offerings. He met us there, arriving by electric bicycle.
Like Bologna, Old Town is
pedestrian only, divided by the Limmat River, which flows into Lake Zurich. This side is hilly and vibrant, known for being “edgier”
than the left bank with its designer boutiques. Crossing the bridge, we were
enthralled with the crisscrossing ferries and boats, the peaky Swiss spires.
I wished we’d had time to
visit the illustrious old Opera House.
I wished we’d had time for more
explorations of the city and the magnificent countryside, but I was focused on
my friend, catching up and getting to know her husband better. They
are a great couple and we parted sadly, cherishing a connection that has
taken us through many lives—and that’s only in this one.
Carol put us on the local
train that would take us to the central station, promising that it would arrive
exactly on time. It did.
Downtown, we boarded the TGV,
the Train à
Grande Vitesse. By an anomaly of online booking, our first class tickets on the
Zurich-Paris line, Lyria, cost little more than second class—lunch and wine
included! We were off for Paris and the Van Gogh Trail.
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