Aug27

Exploring Stuttgart

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Wednesday, 24-July-2024, through Monday, 29-July-2024


Coming from Zermatt, Stuttgart was about as different as you could get.

No mountains soaring above the skyline, warmer air, and cars all around – it was lovely, but definitely a slight shock to the system as I stepped off the train and started to get my bearings. Thankfully the first part of the walk to my hostel was through a park, which was a nice reminder of the mountains and hills I’d just spent a week exploring… it tempered the abruptness nicely, and I was quite grateful for it.

Now, the walk to the hotel… well, I’d get to know that walk quite well over the next few days, and it never got any less steep over that time. Carrying all my bags, it was definitely more of an effort than I’d expected – challenging even after all the time at elevation I’d spent hiking.


Still, though, Stuttgart was lovely and incredibly welcoming. Murals, green spaces, bustling people and delicious food, I couldn’t complain about any of it. And speaking of food, lets dive right in!

  • Bistro Einstein – A lovely cafe, which served my lovely favorite – Schnitzel! Simple, efficient, and delicious.
  • Lib-room – A fun cafe right on a school campus, from what I could tell. Simple and tasty; not something I’d say is a must-visit, but… good, with some nice vegetarian options
  • Restaurant Tauberquelle – A really fun regional restaurant, with great local options. Kinda touristy… but that’s not a bad thing when you’re a tourist!
  • Manufactum Brot & Butter – Excellent breakfast, but a bit slow… which was a problem, since it meant we very nearly missed our train since paying took so long! Also, the only spot that credit cards had trouble… yeah, great food, but there was a blood price to pay.
  • Wasserfallhütte – This is so European… similar to Zermatt, at the top of a hike by a waterfall there’s a small restaurant serving coffee and cakes, ice cream and souvenirs. Ridiculous, but also kind of awesome.
  • Bäckerhaus Veit – Nice snack after a hike… simple and easy!
  • Ragazzi – Delicious pizza! This place was a fun adventure; took a bit of getting there, and then they were out of pizza… which feels weird, but okay… but then they found some extra dough and were able to make two final pizzas, we got the last two! Ignore all the people who came in afterward, who also got pizza… Hey, you know what? If it’s true, then cool. If it was a gimmick, then also cool!
  • Petra’s – Out in Baden-Baden, near the Friedrichsbad hot springs… delicious Cesar salad, excellent coffee… what more could we want?
  • Cafe König – I was in (or right next to, I guess) the Black Forest. How could I not get Black Forest Cake? Turns out – really hard to find. Which seems strange, but it was later in the day so… maybe that’s normal? I don’t know, but Cafe König had it, and had excellent iced lattes, so I was happy.
  • Poffers – Ohh. Emm. Gee. Getting a seat here was a challenge, and then getting service was an equal epic. The food was glorious, but seriously. Needed a reservation, couldn’t get it in person, had to go online to a quite circuitous reservation system, then wait for 20min AFTER the reservation time, THEN wait 20min for service… seriously, we used google translate on the German menus, figured out what we wanted, and had a solid long chat before the waitress even showed up to offer us English menus. Great food, but holy crap.
  • Taraba
  • Udo Snack




Now, those especially astute readers of mine may have noticed something in the above list that hasn’t really been seen before, except maybe in Iceland and France… I wrote in the plural. That’s not an accident, but a fun extra part from Stuttgart!

You see, dear readers, I wasn’t adventuring alone in Germany! Instead, in a switch up from History, Poland and the United States combined forces and invaded Germany together – my friend Kika came to visit from Warsaw! I picked her up from the airport on Thursday morning, and she flew home on Sunday evening, so I had a buddy to explore and adventure with! Definitely a nice change of pace – Details of our adventures will be their own posts, of course, but the change of pace was very nice… between family visiting in France, and a friend with me in Germany, it was an absolutely excellent way to ease into settling into a more static and social life in Ireland.




I also mentioned that Stuttgart had a lot of murals – I’ll separate them out, here, for simplicity:



Aug26

The bus and trains from Zermatt to Stuttgard

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Wednesday, 24-July-2024


With a melancholy sigh, I watched the mountains of Zermatt recede behind me, as the bus pulled away from the cog railway station in Täsch.

Doing so, of course, quickly gave me a whole nice helping of vertigo… so I quickly returned my gaze to the road ahead of the bus as it careened around the steep roads and hairpin turns that would bring us down to Visp. The rest of the cog railway was still out, after the flash floods of May, and I was on the second leg of four legs of this adventure.

A train, to a bus, to a train, to another train. That was my charted course. Frankly, I was a little anxious… but less than I had been in Marseille when I first embarked on a significantly complex train journey. I’d gotten used to it, a little bit at least, and this trip had much more generous layovers than the previous had. I’d figured out the app pretty well, and was able to sit back and enjoy the journey.




I grabbed a (slightly sad) sandwich and pretzel in Zurich. I napped, I reviewed photos, and I read when the train was stable enough to avoid motion sickness.

I enjoyed the views out the window, and soon enough found myself transferring into Germany. It was a simple series of train rides, frankly, and there’s not much to say about them. It worked well, and I heartily endorse Swiss and Germany trains.

Who knew, right?

Aug25

Riding the Gondolas of Zermatt

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Tuesday, 23-July-2024


I’m tired, man. I’ve got a sunburn, I hiked just about a billion miles straight up yesterday, and I’ve still got to pack up for Germany. I’m going to let something else do the work of ascending the mountains of Zermatt today.

I’m going to take the Gondolas.



Zermatt has tons of gondolas. Like… most everywhere you look, there’s a gondola going up to a mountain peak. Or are they ski lifts? I frankly don’t know the difference, so I’m going with Gondolas for the time being, since they sound more interesting.

Zermatt is a mountain / ski town, so it makes a lot of sense, when you think about it, and I was excited to take full advantage of this fact. I’d booked a ticket the evening before, grabbed some breakfast, and set out to let human ingenuity carry me up to the heights surrounding Zermatt.

My first stop was Trockener Steg, up at 9,642ft elevation. It was surprisingly easy to get there, too… Google had told me I’d have to take a couple of different gondola rides up, but in the end it turns out that all those “separate” rides are actually just one continuous chain… Sure, my car switched cables, but it was all automated. I had the difficult job of sitting still, enjoying the views, and taking pictures out the windows:


At Trockener Steg, I disembarked and wandered a bit… quickly realizing just how high of an elevation I was at. I usually deal with elevation fairly well, but this time… Well, I’ll blame the quick ascent for my vertigo, but dear lord it kicked my butt. I’d planned on quickly continuing my ascent, but frankly I was simply unable to – I was woozy and disoriented, to a rather concerning extreme if I’m being honest.

I walked slowly and carefully, in light of the light oxygen count. I found a restaurant (with Schnitzel!), drank a ton of water, and took some time to let my brain get used to the decreased oxygen count. As an interesting note – a humans “SpO2 count” is a measure of blood oxygenation. At sea level this is usually 98% for people – this drops to 95% at 5,00ft (Zermatt), and further drops to 90% at 10,000ft.

Anyways, I never really regained full sanity, and so pushed onward to my highest destination – Matterhorn Glacier Paradise, at 12,840ft elevation.

I arrived on one of the last cars… unfortunately, my attempt to acclimatize to the elevation up at Trockener had taken a bit too long, and Glacier Paradise was closing up – I had just enough time to appreciate the views (and the lovely cold!) before being shepherded back to the final gondola descending back to Zermatt.



The descent was lovely, with slightly different views from the ascent to keep me company. I had fun, I enjoyed, and I appreciated the views… as the blood in my poor abused body and brain slowly re-saturated with oxygen, and my mind started working a little more effectively again. I watched a snow cat grade one of the still-open ski slops, I enjoyed a bit of early sunset on the peaks, and I thanked the town for one last adventure before I dove into packing up for the next day’s adventure…