Schaffhausen

 On Friday, September 23rd, we ate breakfast at our hotel, then tried to take a river cruise, but it turned out that they were not operating until nearly eleven a.m.  So, we checked out, left our luggage, and took the train to Schaffhausen--somewhere nearby that looked interesting.

Scaffhausen is most famous for the Rhine Falls.  While the biggest waterfall in Europe, it is more akin to the Great Falls of the Potomac than to Niagara.  We saw it in 2006, on the way from Tuttlingen to Bern.  We would actually have a pretty good view of it from the train both coming and going.  In the end, we decided not to spend the time to walk or bus out to the falls from Schaffhausen.

We visited the Tourist Information office to get some ideas what to do, including a self-guided walking tour of the Old Town.  While an English-speaker would assume that the name of the city is pronounced SCHAFF-hau-sen, with the accent on the first syllable, it sounded to me like the Swiss were actually pronouncing it schaff-HAU-sen, with the accent on the second syllable.

But now it was time for lunch.  The salad at La Piazza was the best we had on this trip.  Nothing else lived up to that.

We went to the Münsterkirche--a romanesque abbey church with a modern interior, then down to the Rhine, then up and up to the sixteenth-century Munot fortress.

We caught our train back to Zurich, passing the Rhine Falls again.  After picking up our luggage, we took a train to Baar, in Canton Zug, where we checked in at the Ibis, right across from the station.  We know Ibis; we are used to Ibis; they are all the same: spare but comfortable.

That evening, we took the five-minute train ride to Zug, where we met Mary Joy's cousin Eva and her husband, Andreas, for a nice dinner at Löwen.