Chicago and Home

Philadelphia Airport had, apparently since the last time we had come through, three works before, adopted free wi-fi, so I was able to post to the blog from there. When we got to O’Hare, everything had gone too well. We took the Blue train downtown. Toward the end of the ride, we noticed that it appeared to be raining. We changed to the Red subway and then got off at Clark and Division. We came up out of the subway into a downpour, with thunder and lightning (one stroke was uncomfortably close). Our small umbrellas were pretty much useless and soon we and our luggage were very wet. Rather than walk the last few blocks to our hotel, I flagged down a taxi (Chicago is a very good taxi town—they are always cruising the major streets, and all you have to do is find one with the “Taxi” sign lit up and wave your arm). We got in and I told the driver (an African immigrant) to take us to the Ambassador East. He looked surprised and said that it was just over in that direction. I replied that we needed to get out of the rain. So he took us the three or four remaining blocks and let us off. Too little, too late. Our clothes were soaked through, as was much of what we were carrying in our luggage. Our room was soon festooned with stuff hanging to dry.

We managed to scrounge together enough clothes to go to dinner. We asked the woman at the front desk to recommend a nearby, informal, ethnic restaurant. She suggested Mario’s Ristorante, a block away. It fit all our requirements. The food wasn’t outstanding, but it was good enough, under the circumstances.

The next morning (Wednesday, July 7th), the last day of our trip, we had breakfast at a restaurant that we had been to a number of times, and liked our breakfast, but there was a problem with the bill (either gross incompetence or dishonesty, or both), so we won’t eat there again.

We went back to the hotel, checked out (they stored our luggage for us), and walked over to the beginning of Michigan Avenue. Mary Joy said that she could see herself living in one of the brownstone rowhouses we passed on the way—we guessed the prices in that neighborhood to be at least a million dollars. We went down Michigan, in what was already (10:30) sauna-like heat, to the Chicago Architecture Foundation, across from the Art Institute. We have, over the years, taken a number of their walking tours (all very interesting), and once we took their boat tour on the Chicago River, though Mary Joy missed most of the narration by being under deck, buying candy and pop for her niece, whom we had been talked into taking along.

We got there in time to take the 11:00 two-hour “Intersections” tour. The CFA has now gone hi-tech—the docent has a microphone and everyone in the group carries a radio receiver with an earphone. Our docent, Jim, walked us around downtown, pointing out how buildings very close to one another and/or with similar purposes and uses were built very differently, depending on the era. For instance, he showed us three houses of worship very close together—a synagogue from the 1950s, St. Peter in the Loop Catholic Church (with whose Schola Mary Joy’s brother and sister-in-law have often played and recorded) from, I think, the early 60s, in two very different modern styles, and the Chicago Temple Methodist church from the 1920s, which was like a medieval gothic church which had had the top half sliced off and a tall Art Deco office building stuck between the entrance level and the spire! Also, right near each other were the ponderously monumental neoclassical City-County Building of about a hundred years ago, the International Style 1960s glass and (intentionally) rusted steel city offices, and Helmut Jahn’s post-modernist phantasmagoria State of Illinois building, which looks something like a big circus tent. We ended up at the new Millennium Park, with its big, polished “bean,” its Frank Gehry bridge and music pavilion and the fountain that is a big block with films of people’s faces—every five minutes the person in the film opens his or her mouth and real water gushes out on the waiting kids below. We enjoyed the tour very much.

Afterwards, as suggested on the tour, we visited the Chicago Cultural Center, formerly the Public Library, and saw the Tiffany glass dome there. Gorgeous.

We had intended to have a late lunch-early dinner at Rick Bayless’s new restaurant, Xoco, but when we got there we discovered that it and his other restaurants (we’ve eaten at and greatly enjoyed the Frontera Grill) were closed so that Bayless could take the entire staff on their annual trip to Mexico, presumably to keep the food as authentic as possible and to come up with new ideas. This had happened to us once before, also in early July, so we’ll remember for future reference.

Instead, we ate at the reliably decent, if not exciting, Bistro 110, half a block from the Water Tower. We’ve eaten there a number of times and know what to expect (sort of like my dad and Perkins). Then we went back to the hotel, picked up our luggage, walked back to the subway, caught the Red train to Lake Street, got out and up the stairs to the El and eventually caught a crowded Orange train to Midway Airport.

What with lugging our (heavier than when we started the trip) luggage around, Mary Joy was exhausted by then and said “Never again!” as far as taking public transit in this sort of situation, even though it’s a lot cheaper than a shuttle or taxi. I passionately love the CTA and the New York subways. Mary Joy does not--she thinks they’re dirty and crowded and it’s too difficult to maneuver in them with luggage. I adore BART in San Francisco, the MTA in Boston (unlike the man in the song, I did return, and am not riding forever ‘neath the streets of Boston), the London Underground, the U-Bahn and S-Bahn in Berlin, the Metros in Paris, Rome, Madrid (even though a man I was jammed against in the Madrid metro attempted to pick my pocket—I stared him down and he got off at the next stop), Milan, Barcelona, Budapest, Vienna, Prague (as well as the streetcars in Vienna and Prague!) and even in Mexico City (you don’t know what a sardine feels like until you’ve ridden the Mexico City Metro at rush hour). I fell in love with urban rail, as the fastest, best and most efficient way to get around in big cities, at the age of thirteen, back in 1964, when I visited my uncle in Cleveland Heights and he took me downtown on the Cleveland Rapid Transit. There was nothing at all like that in Alliance!

Once we got to Midway, there were no problems, other than a half-hour delay due to nearby lightning, though I was disappointed that this Southwest pilot didn’t play the harmonica. We took a taxi from the Humphrey Terminal and got home around 9:30 p.m.

Dublin Again

Sunday morning (July 4th), before checking out of the guesthouse, we took a walk up the street instead of down, for the first time since we had arrived, and discovered the convent church of St. Ursula, with mass in progress (and a much better organ than at Herz Jesu).

But we had to leave almost immediately to catch the 10:28 train to Geneva Airport. There, after about a 2½ ride, we had no problem taking the 3:45 Aer Lingus flight to Dublin, where we again took the Airlink 747 bus into town and got off at O'Connell Street, a couple of blocks from our hotel, the Best Western Premier Academy Plaza, the same that we had had at the beginning of the trip.

Ireland, of course, is substantially different from Switzerland. The cuisine is much better, as we proved by following a Rough Guide (online) recommendation and going to a restaurant called Eden, on Meetinghouse Square, near Temple Bar. It has a kind of artsy, bohemian feel, with modern décor. Our table was right next to the open kitchen, so my back was warmed and Mary Joy had a front-row seat to watch meals being prepared. Our food was very good.

We wandered around a little, up the pedestrianized shopping of Grafton Street, to St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin’s central park (though not anywhere as big as New York’s Central Park). They were closing the gates as we arrived (9 p.m.), and all the shops were closed, since it was Sunday evening, so we walked back down Grafton Street, past Trinity College and the Old Parliament, across the Liffey and up O’Connell Street, back to our hotel.

There is an Ireland-related story that I forgot to tell earlier. On the night in Interlaken that we were unsuccessfully looking for wi-fi, as we left McDonald’s, Mary Joy saw a group of five or six young (12- or 13-year-old) girls. She approached them and asked them in German if they knew where we could find internet access. They were clearly having trouble understanding what she meant because, as it turned out, they weren’t Swiss but Irish. Assuming that someone walking on the Hoheweg in Interlaken lives in Interlaken and is not a tourist is like assuming that someone walking in Times Square in New York is a New Yorker and not a tourist. When the Irish girls learned that we were from the U.S., they asked if we’d been to Canada. Yes. Had we been to Toronto? Yes, Mary Joy had. Had we met Justin Bieber? Mary Joy had no idea who they were talking about. Of course, they didn’t really expect that just because we were from the same continent as the latest boy singer teen heartthrob, we would actually know him. I think that American girls of that age might have asked a Canadian the same thing, but they would have been louder and more obvious about it. Irish humor is deadpan, low-key, subtle, full of whimsy.

On Monday morning (July 5th), we got on a big bus on O’Connell Street for the Mary Gibbons tour to the Hill of Tara and Newgrange. Most of the other people on board, it turned out, were students from Loyola University in New Orleans, in Dublin for a summer program at Trinity College.

Mary Gibbons Tours, though very well reviewed in the guidebooks, appears to be basically a one-woman operation, with Mary herself guiding the tours. On the way to Tara, she was very informative about Irish history and prehistory, especially as it related to the valley of the River Boyne.

First stop was the Hill of Tara, where we were let out to look around for half an hour. Though nothing was left of its ancient glory as the seat of Irish High Kings except various earthworks, the site itself, with its views over long distances, was what must have impressed people back then. We had someone take our picture by the rock where the High Kings were crowned.

We got back on the bus, and on the way to the interpretive center for the great passage tombs of Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth, we passed Slane Castle, home to rock concerts and the first “Celtic Woman” TV special. Then Mary told us about the Battle of the Boyne, which, in 1690, confirmed Protestant rule in England and Ireland.

At the interpretive center, we went through the exhibition area, then saw a seven-minute film and, eventually, walked out across a bridge to a pickup area, where we and the other members of the Mary Gibbons group had a 1:45 pickup time. The Newgrange passage tomb had had some sort of fungal invasion, so now the number of visitors was strictly limited. Each group had to be taken by bus to the tomb at a particular time, and was given one hour there. Our buses picked us up, went the 3 kilometers (about two miles) to Newgrange and deposited us at the gate, where we were met by an Office of Public Works (equivalent to the Park Service) guide, also named Mary. She led us up the hill at a brisk walk, leading us to think of hiking in Switzerland. There, while she was speaking, it suddenly started raining, heavily, and just as suddenly stopped. She put on a windbreaker without dropping a word and just as expertly (the Irish are experts in rain showers) took it off again. I got wet, but quickly dried off. Mary Joy had gotten her windbreaker on almost as quickly as Mary.

We learned about how the tomb had been built, around 5200 years ago—before the pyramids, a thousand years before Stonehenge, how the entrance had been discovered in the late 1600s, how it had been excavated and restored (controversially) in the 1960s to 80s. Mary told us the various theories as to what the geometric art incised in its huge stones meant and how the tomb might (or might not) have been used. She then took us inside, through a long, narrow, uphill passage and told us about how at dawn (8:58 a.m.) on the winter solstice and four surrounding days, light from the rising sun would penetrate to the center of the giant mound.

Then we got a chance to look around and take pictures before going back to the interpretive center, then back to Dublin.

For dinner, we went to Fallon & Byrne, a big food hall, plus wine bar, plus restaurant. Mary Joy thought it was pretentious and the meal she had didn’t work either conceptually or in execution. I didn’t like it as much as Eden, but I thought it was okay and didn’t get angry about it.

Then, we went to Stephen’s Green. Mary Joy found the number of drunks around in Dublin (begging, weaving around, talking to themselves, sleeping on benches) disturbing. Unlike in the United States, where most drunks and panhandlers look to be middle-aged (maybe prematurely), a large proportion of those in Dublin appeared to be in their twenties.

We went looking for Irish traditional music, but figured that the best we could do under the circumstances would be something heavily touristy. We were right. We ended up at Oliver St. John Gogarty’s Pub, which has “trad” music seven nights a week, and since that music is loudly amplified, it can be heard out on the street, to draw people in. We were drawn in, and ended up enjoying ourselves. There was a three-piece band—singer and M.C. on guitar (didn’t get his name), elderly accordionist Des Leach and Leach’s daughter Norie (?) on fiddle. They were very good (though it would have been better without the amplifiers), and the guitarist kept up a funny patter and interaction with the (overwhelmingly American) audience. The whole place was still decorated with American flags and the waitstaff wore black cowboy hats, in honor of the Fourth of July. We went to the bar, and I ordered a Guiness, while Mary Joy apologized to the bartender for not being able to have a beer and asked if a mineral water would be okay. The bartender, with typical Irish tongue-in-cheek, replied that he, too, was sorry that she couldn’t have a beer, but that a mineral water would be fine. We stayed for quite a while, and bought one of their CDs, before heading back to the hotel.

This morning (Tuesday, July 6th), we caught the Airlink bus to the airport. Dublin is one of the few places where you go through U.S. immigration before you arrive in the United States. The only problem with that was that the waiting area for the flight, after passing through Immigration, is too small. Otherwise everything has gone uneventfully. I have spent most of the flight catching up with this blog, to post when we get to Chicago.

Saas Fee

After leaving Leuk, we got on a train to Visp, where we caught the bus to Saas Fee. Saas Fee is surrounded tightly on three sides by mountains, a number of them over 4000 meters (more than 13,000 feet) high. Until not so long ago, it was inaccessible to motor vehicles. Once a road was opened, however, it quickly became a major ski resort, with year-round skiing and ski-boarding. It is also a hiking center and has a revolving restaurant that, at 3500 meters (nearly 12,000 feet), is 500 meters (more than 1500 feet) higher than the Schilthorn’s.

We didn’t go to that restaurant. We didn’t do any (serious) hiking. We certainly didn’t go skiing and ski-boarding. Instead, we went up to the lowest lift destination, Hannig (2360 meters, about 7800 feet), walked about twenty minutes, to a nearby glacial valley, walked back, had prune cake and mineral water (Mary Joy) and Rivella (me), saw a tame marmot and took the gondola back down to Saas Fee.

Another digression. Earlier, I compared Rivella to Fanta. That might create an incorrect impression. Instead of being a bright orange color, Rivella is an orangish amber. It isn’t nearly as sweet-tasting as Orange Crush.

As to the marmot, when we had taken the Marmot Trail above Zermatt, we hadn’t seen any marmots (except for the carved, wooden variety), but they had seen us, as indicated by the whistles we heard. The marmot at Hannig was used to being fed by tourists, so he posed for us (down and left from the blue framework).

We took the Postal Bus back to Visp, along curving mountain roads. Occasionally a bus would have to honk its horn to warn oncoming traffic that it was coming around a curve. The horn of a Postal Bus is not like your usual car horn, it is more like a bicycle horn, or the taxi horns in Gershwin’s “An American in Paris.” It has at least three different notes, and when I heard it on the way to Saas Fee, it sounded like the first three notes of George M. Cohan’s World War I song “Over There,” only with an equal dash-dash-dash rhythm, instead of the song’s dot-dot-dash (i.e., “Oh-Verr-Theere” instead of “O-Ver-Theere”).

Up ahead, we saw what looked like rain, and soon we were in the midst of it. Mary Joy was uncomfortable with how fast we were going around those curves on slick, wet roads, with lower visibility, but apparently the driver knew what he was doing, because he got us to Visp, where the rain was over as quickly as it had started. We took the train back to Brig.

We went to the 6:30 p.m. mass at Herz Jesu (Heart of Jesus) Church. It is a semi-circular church from the 1970s or 1980s, not very large, with a baroque-style organ on the right side. At this mass, a visiting church choir from somewhere in Germany was singing. They started off badly, with an off-key Gloria, but got better later on. They were not, however, as good as Mary Joy’s choir. Maybe she can wangle an invitation to sing in Brig.

We went again to Restaurant Channa, where our third meal was the worst of the three—pizza with canned vegetables as the topping.

Leuk

Saturday (July 3), we tentatively decided to go to the wine area down the Rhone, along the so-called “Roesti Line” (the border between French- and German-speaking Switzerland—and French- and German-eating Switzerland, since presumably only German-speakers eat roesti (“Swiss hash browns,” as the English-language restaurant menus put it)). But the lady who runs the guesthouse, almost by herself, suggested going to Saas Fee (a mountain resort), instead, while Lonely Planet enthused about Leuk. The idea of taking a two-hour walk through the vineyards, between Sierre and Salgesh, seemed less and less fun—we were tired out from our other hikes, and it was clearly going to be a real scorcher. So, on the train, as Leuk came along, we impulsively got out, although Mary Joy had told the conductor, in German, that we were staying on to Sierre. It turned out that he was French-speaking, from Lausanne, and of course preferred wine from that region to the local wines. Mary Joy then switched to French with him.

A digression. Mary Joy has been handling things very well in three different languages: German, French and Italian, with occasional stabs at Swiss German dialect. Even her English was passable (occasionally, back in the U.S., people ask what country she’s from—she enunciates much better than the average American, so some people assume that she’s a foreigner).

We got off at Leuk and walked up the hill to the old town. Just below was the Ringanker Church, a beautiful late-seventeenth-century baroque chapel. When Mary Joy saw the organ up in the choir loft, her jaw dropped. It was a small, clearly old, baroque organ that had been beautifully repainted and restored, The sacristan was setting up for a wedding, but when Mary Joy asked her about the organ, she smiled, got the key and opened the door to the choir loft. We went up the narrow, winding staircase and emerged by the organ, which Mary Joy enthusiastically inspected, asking me to take pictures of the stops. When we got back down, Mary Joy explained to the sacristan that she was an organist. The sacristan laughed and replied that that had been obvious.

We went up to the old town, which was full of medieval alleyways and buildings. The 13th-century bishop’s castle had been renovated, oddly enough, by the well-known modern Swiss architect Mario Botta, who had stuck a big glass egg on the top. We enjoyed wandering around the town very much, but since we had decided to go to Saas Fee, we needed to catch the train back to Visp, partway to Brig.

I'm falling behind in my posts, but I should be able to catch up by doing my writing on the plane to the U.S., tomorrow.

The Aletsch Glacier and Riederalp

Friday (July 2nd), on our way to the train, we picked up some rolls and some meat--dried beef, a local specialty—Mary Joy thinks that we should try local specialties. But after two weeks in Switzerland, we’ve decided that we would much rather have Italian local specialties—I’ve managed to avoid Swiss “cuisine” by eating much more pizza here than I had the last time we were in Italy.

This would be our last mountain hiking day, and our destination would be the longest glacier in Europe, the Aletsch Glacier (23 kilometers or 14 miles). It is up on a high plateau above the Rhone valley, just upstream from Brig. We took a half-hour train ride to Fiesch, where we went to the Tourist Information office. We knew that we wanted to take the cable car up to the Eggishorn, which Lonely Planet recommends as the best place to see the glacier, but we asked if there were some relatively easy but scenic walks in the neighborhood. Besides, we would like to visit Riederalp, which is also up on the same plateau—you don’t often get to go to a town named after you. If anyone happens to know of a Perozville . .

The lady at tourist information suggested an easy 1½-hour walk to an outlook over the glacier, near the Gletscherstube restaurant, which is on the shore of a glacial lake. This sounded like the beginning part of Lonely Planet’s featured 7-hour hike. Lonely Planet mentioned another, shorter route to the same place, but said that a large part of it would be through a very long, very dark (and by definition, unscenic) tunnel. It was a little disturbing when the route signs said that the Lonely Planet route would take 2½ hours, while the tunnel route would take two hours. The Swiss trail signs do tend to overestimate times, but a whole hour meant that something was not quite right.

But before then we bought two all-day passes for all the various lifts (cable cars, funiculars, gondolas, etc.) on the Aletsch Glacier plateau (half price with our Swiss Pass), then headed up from Fiesch to Fiescheralp, then all the way up to the Eggishorn. The view over the glacier across to its beginning at the Jungfraujoch, was awesome. We could see the southern (“back”) sides of the tops of the Jungfau, Moench and Eiger. After soaking this all in, we eventually went down to Fiescheralp to begin our hike. It was now 12:30, and the last gondola down to Fiesch would leave at 6 p.m., so we would have to be back within 5½ hours, or we’d have to walk down! We headed out, and the trail, was, indeed, very scenic and at first, not very difficult, but after 50 minutes on the trail, the sign said that we were still 1½ hours from the Gletscherstube. Not long after that, the trail finally started going up. And up. And up, on switchback after switchback after switchback. It wasn’t as steep as at the Rigi, but it seemed to last forever, and the trail was narrow, and Mary Joy was getting tired. We met several groups of Swiss coming down, and when Mary Joy expressed anxiety about the difficulty of the trail, they pooh-poohed it. A couple of women said “Ruhe” and “langsam”—“rest” and “slowly.” And then, we saw two men on bikes coming down the trail, riding their bikes until they came to us, and walking them around us! “Gefaehrlich!” (“Dangerous!”), said Mary Joy to one of them. “Nein,” he replied, smiling, and got back on his bike and rode down the steep, narrow switchbacks. Well, they are called “mountain bikes,” after all.

Finally, we got to the top, and things got a lot easier. However, dark clouds were beginning to move in. We got up to the Gletscherstube about 2:30, half an hour ahead of what the sign had said, but half an hour longer than the woman at the tourist information office had said. We went out toward the overlook that had been recommended, but didn’t go all the way, because the “15 minutes” on the sign pointing the way to it was becoming closer to half an hour. So we stopped, in view of the glacier, and had some dried beef sandwiches. Down below us, walking toward the glacier, were groups of boy scouts and girl scouts. As we finished eating, we heard thunder in the distance, then, as we headed back towards the Gletscherstube, we felt raindrops. It didn’t rain heavily, however, and we got to the tunnel, following the boy scouts and ahead of the girl scouts, before getting soaked.

The tunnel was lighted, as people we had met on the trail had assured us, but minimally. Since it had many deep puddles on the floor, with some large rocks as stepping stones, Lonely Planet’s recommendation of bringing a flashlight was a good idea, but, unfortunately, we didn’t have one on hand. Of course, the boy scouts were making loud noises as they went through. About halfway through there was a side niche, lit, with a shrine to the Blessed Virgin. I had somehow gotten the impression from Lonely Planet that it would take ninety minutes to traverse this tunnel. It actually only took about fifteen. When we got out the other side, it was not raining, but there was the occasional roar of thunder in the distance. All in all, getting back from Gletscherstube to Fiescheralp took only an hour, compared to the two hours it had taken the long way around. The woman at the information office must have assumed that we would take the short and easy route, through the tunnel.

We got back down to Fiesch, after deciding that we had time to take the train to Moerel and from there to take the cable car up to Riederalp, which we did.

Riederalp is a cute mountain resort village (with a golf course, of all things). We were there principally to take Mary Joy’s picture under a sign that said “Riederalp,” but that proved hard to do, since people who are in Riederalp apparently know that they’re in Riederalp and don’t need to be reminded of it by signs. Eventually, we found a couple of somewhat useable signs and took the pictures, then we walked around a little and finally had something to drink while we sat at a terrace restaurant and read the International Herald Tribune. When we took the cable car down to Moerel, it had started to rain a little, and as we ran for shelter in the railroad station, the rain started to come down in torrents. But, again, by the time we had taken the train back to Brig, the rain had ended. We had dinner at Channa again, both of us taking a salad with grilled shrimp. We liked the shrimp, but as for the salad, it occurred to me that the most important difference between Germans (including German-speaking Swiss) and Italians is that when Italians think of salad dressing, they think of olive oil, while when Germans think of salad dressing, they think of vinegar.

That evening there was a performance on the town square by a group of three accordionists. This was not the stereotypical Swiss accordion group—think guys in their early twenties wearing tank-tops, shorts and flip-flops.

Stockalperschloss

The most important historical building in Brig, up the hill from downtown, is the Stockalperschloss--"Stockalper's Castle"--a large mansion with onion-bulbed towers, built in the seventeenth century by Kaspar Jodok von Stockalper, a powerful merchant who tried to control trade over the Simplon Pass (just south of here) to and from Italy. It has a large courtyard in the center, which last evening was the scene of a wedding. We happened to come upon it while a brass band was playing there for the bride and groom!

The reason we were there is because for our four days in Brig we have been staying right next door, at the Oberes Wegenerhaus, Gaestehaus St. Ursula, which is an eighteenth-century merchant's mansion, turned into a combination old-nuns' home, old-people's home and B&B, run by the Ursuline sisters. Although some of the correspondence involved in setting things up was in German, it wasn't too difficult. We like it, even the Swiss music on the radio at breakfast, which brings Mary Joy fond memories of growing up in Monroe.

Night in Brig

Where we are staying in Brig is nice (Mary Joy obsesses about denting the beautiful wood floor in our room), but there is no air conditioning, so when it’s as warm as it is, we have to keep the windows open at night. The street we face on doesn’t have much traffic, but it is cobblestoned and with the old buildings close in it’s like an echo chamber. When a car does come down the street, it sounds like a freight train and when a group of loud people walks down shouting at 3:15 in the morning, you don’t sleep through it.

Pretty quickly, you realize that instead of the standard Westminster chime, the local church’s bells are playing the Lourdes Hymn:

5:15: “Immaculate Mary”
5:30: “Immaculate Mary, your praises we sing.”
5:45: “Immaculate Mary, your praises we sing. You reign now in splendor”
6:00: “Immaculate Mary, your praises we sing. You reign now in splendor with Jesus our . . .” Pause. “King, king, king, king, king, king.” No Aves.

Matterhorn

I’ve gone back and added some pictures to earlier postings.

This morning (Thursday, July 1st) we caught the 8:28 train to Visp, and from there we took a train to Zermatt, arriving a little before ten. From the plaza in front of the station you can look up and see Switzerland’s most famous natural monument. We crossed the river and went up to Sunegga (2288 meters, around 7600 feet) in an underground funicular. From there, we had our own gondola car up to Blauherd (2571 meters, about 8300 feet). Then, we took the cable car to Rothorn (3103 meters, 10,180 feet).

The Matterhorn must be very accustomed to having its picture taken. Certainly, I added my share to those millions of photos, as Sunegga, Blauherd and Rothorn all provided the mountain with opportunities to pose.

Eva and Andreas had suggested going to Fluhalp, where they had had a room. It is also known for its restaurant. Rick Steves suggested walking there from Blauherd. The woman at the tourist information office suggested walking down from Rothorn. Having digested all these suggestions by the time we arrived at Rothorn, we decided that we didn’t feel much like walking at that altitude, especially walking down about 500 meters. Going from Blauherd (2571) to Stellisee (2537) to Fluhalp (2616) seemed more within our range of ambitions. So we took the cable car back down to Blauherd and started our walk from there. It was a very nice walk, first through moss-covered boulders to the pretty little glacial lake, Stellisee. Near its outlet some architecture students had built an odd-looking structure, made of rounded wooden slats. You could enter it and go up, keeping in the same direction, and eventually, after going around twice, you would end up back down at the place you had begun. From Stellisee we walked up a slate-strewn hillside to Fluhalp, a large wooden building with red shutters and a deck terrace. It was a restaurant-hotel, and we sat on the deck and had a very nice lunch. I had a bacon and vinegar salad, but with all sorts of things added to the lettuce, including chicken pieces and little mushrooms. Mary Joy had mountain trout (perhaps caught in the Stellisee) in meuniere sauce, with roesti (a Swiss way of cooking potatoes, similar to hash browns).

We decided to go back down by the “Murmelweg,” or “Marmot Trail,” a route celebrating the principal inhabitant of these heights, a rodent somewhat similar to a groundhog. Basically, it would go down to Sunegga, without passing through Blauherd. Unlike the other trails there, this one was marked in yellow on the trail signs, indicating only a “Wanderweg” (“Hiking Trail”), instead of the white-red-white that shows a “Bergwanderweg” (“Mountain Hiking Trail”). In other words, the Marmot Trail was supposed to be the sort of trail suitable for wimps and grannies (non-Swiss grannies, that is—Swiss grannies have a lifetime of experience on near-perpendicular trails). We were feeling that we had met enough challenges recently and were due for nothing more than a pleasant walk.

It appears that the sole basis of distinction between a Wanderweg and a Bergwanderweg is steepness, because if anything else were taken into account, the Marmot Trail would be a champion Bergwanderweg. Though it avoided steep grades by the use of many, many switchbacks, on a lot of them the footing was none too sure. In addition, there is a long stretch where the trail is very narrow—not much more than a foot wide, with a steep drop-off to the left. But we got down to Sunegga, cheered by the wooden statues of marmots (and their predators and annoyers) along the way.

At Sunegga, we sat on the deck and I had a beer, while Mary Joy had a Rivella. Rivella is a type of Swiss soda pop, sort of like an orange Fanta, but, we are assured by the label, containing milk serum.

We went back down the funicular and walked around a little in the commercial frenzy of downtown Zermatt. Zermatt has no gasoline-powered vehicles, but there are millions of electric-powered little trucks, buses and taxis, whose drivers appear to be overcome by the urge to more than make up for the lack of gasoline-powered dangers to pedestrians. We ran into one of Zermatt’s best-known tourist attractions: goatherds walking their goats down the main street of town.

We escaped on the 5:13 train and went immediately to dinner at an Italian restaurant called Channa. It had an open interior courtyard, with no smoking (unlike the tables out front of a Swiss restaurant). We didn’t have much (Mary Joy had a salad, while I had a Margherita pizza), but it was good.

On our way back to our room, Mary Joy asked me to wait for her (I wouldn’t accompany her) while she went up the next street to see if the big church there was open. Half an hour later, I went up in search of her. The church door was locked and no Mary Joy in sight. I ran back to our guesthouse to see if she had gotten back there somehow, and I saw her up the street, talking with a woman. The woman turned out to have the key to the church, as well as to the chapel before which they were now standing. Well, addictions are addictions.