We went to the railroad station and had our Swiss Half-Fare Cards validated. Swiss rail tickets, and especially cable car and funicular tickets up the mountains, are very expensive. I hadn't thought that we would do enough travel to make an eight-day rail pass worthwhile, but we had used "halb-tax" cards before, and once you spend an amount on tickets equal to the price of the card, you are ahead of the game. We then bought our tickets to Interlaken West, and since we knew exactly which TGV bullet trains we wanted to take from Lyon to Avignon and back on Friday and were afraid that those trains might fill up if we didn't get our reservations soon, we asked if we could buy French train tickets somewhere in the station. Yes, in the travel center. We went there and, since buying tickets at the counter would cost ten francs a ticket, we first tried using one of the computer monitors, through which you could select and reserve your place, then pay for it at the counter without the fee (we learned this from the gentleman at the information station on the floor). I had tried, unsuccessfully, to buy tickets online from the French national railroad website--it had balked at the payment stage, without actually crashing my credit or debit card. (A digression: you must notify your card company before you go abroad, or they will assume that any payment or withdrawal is fraudulent and shut the card down.) Now, the machine here also took us through the whole process, only to be unable to finish it up at the very end. So, finally, we went to the counter and paid our twenty francs in fees to have the nice lady there get our tickets. And there turned out to be a problem, though not a major one. On the Avignon-Lyon train, only one assigned seat was available. The other would be assigned at the time of boarding. This apparently meant that the train was almost full, so it was a good thing that we had gotten our reservation now, since we would need to take that train, even though it was inconveniently early, or an even earlier one, in order to catch our flight to Berlin Friday afternoon.
Sorting this all out took us past the normal noon checkout time, so it was good that we had late checkout privileges. We returned to the Ibis, checked out and left our luggage in storage. Then we went around the corner to pick up the 16 tram into the Old Town, stopping at the Markplatz (Market Square), where there was a market going on in front of the City Hall, which dated from the Middle Ages, but had been renovated in the late nineteenth century, with a romanticized version of medieval decoration. As suggested by Lonely Planet Basel (which we had on our iPad) we went up the hill through the medieval streets to the Spalentor, one of the only three remaining city gates. (Another digression: one of the reasons I had gotten the iPad in the first place was to carry e-versions of guide books and other books. Books have been the principal very heavy weight in my daypack. It is slightly more awkward to be carrying an iPad from sight to sight, instead of a guidebook, but here it turned out pretty well.). We came back down by the Marktplatz, then went up the other side to the Muensterplatz. The Muenster is the medieval cathedral, built of reddish stone, with a large, stone St. George, in stone plate armor, spearing a stone dragon, on the front left facade. The most interesting thing inside is the tomb of the famous 16th-century humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, whose best-known work, the satirical "In Praise of Folly," was dedicated to his friend Thomas More (the original Latin version--"Moriae Encomium"--
of the book's title involves a pun on More's name). Though he hoped for reform of the Renaissance Catholic Church, in the end he disappointed his Protestant friends because he thought that the Reformation went too far. I had to ask where he is buried--there is a large inscription on the back side of a pillar near the front of the nave.So far, we hadn't had so much as a glimpse of the Rhine, Basel's reason for existence. The city is at the head of navigation on the river, just below the mighty Rhine Falls at nearby Schaffhausen, just as St. Paul, Minnesota is at the head of navigation on the Mississippi, below the St. Anthony Falls at Minneapolis.
We went to the Baerfusserplatz, where we picked up the 16 tram again and took it through the Marktplatz to the Schifflaende stop, the end of the line, at the Middle Bridge over the Rhine. We went out onto the bridge and looked upstream and down. There were some bathing places nearby, full of swimmers in the unaccustomed heat. Then we went back to find the 16 tram again, but we couldn't find a stop for it going toward the railroad station. No problem: we took the 14 instead back to the Marktplatz, where we got off and caught the next 16 to our hotel. We picked up our bags, went to the station, bought some lunch sandwiches at a standstill, then caught the 3:30 train to Interlaken.
At Thun, four recent University of Colorado graduates boarded the train and sat across from us. They were still on their first day of travel, having flown from Denver to Amsterdam to Zurich. They would finish their very long day at Gimmelwald, going on to Milan on Sunday, then to Nice, Venice and other points that I don't now remember. We suggested some hikes as we rounded the Thunersee, then we said goodbye as we arrived at Interlaken West, around 5:30. We rolled our bags across the Aare on Bahnhofstrasse into Unterseen, checked into our nice apartment for the third time since 2010, and, after picking up some provisions at Co-op, went to dinner in Unterseen's old town, sharing a pizza and salad at Citta Vecchia, where I had my first Rugenbrau beer of this return to Interlaken. Across the street is the Unterseen Stadthaus (city hall), which has a restaurant where we've also eaten. Family tradition has it that Mary Joy's great-great-grandfather worked at the Stadthaus in the second half of the nineteenth century, whether managing the restaurant or in some other capacity isn't clear. So maybe Mary Joy has restaurateurs on both sides of the family (her maternal grandfather had a restaurant in Kenosha, Wisconsin), which might explain her interest in good food. Then, back to our apartment, which now, unlike earlier, had WiFi, catching up on e-mails and doing some planning, then went to bed. It was raining heavily--we were told later that this was the first rain here in three weeks.
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