Tag Archives: Trains

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?

Nov15

Daniel’s birthday party in the grand town of Boston

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Early August, 2014

 

Daniel was born.

I know, I was surprised too.  I always thought that he just sort of appeared one day, descending down from the heavens on a sport rope, wiping the chalk off his hands and asking who was ready to give him another belay.

But, he is in fact born of humankind, and thus celebrates a birthday like the rest of us.  So…. we threw a party.

To prep for it, I walked over to Liz’s place.  Then, Liz and I walked to Porter, to pick out a cake topper.  See… Daniel likes trains [Ed Note: See the post about the TGV in France], and I like making fun of Daniel.  So, I was aiming to throw him a train-themed party.  And what theme party is complete without a cute little cake topper?  None, that’s what party.  And I wasn’t going to throw an incomplete party, no sir!

The first store didn’t have any trains.  The second story didn’t have any trains.  Thankfully, the children’s bookstore did, in fact, have trains.  And the second store had a train-shaped balloon… so the combination of the two was deemed sufficient to create a train-themed atmosphere.

A few miles longer found us picking out a cake.  Another mile after that, the Mass Ave Tavern.

The Mass Ave Tavern is a good party place.  There are many reasons for this, but chief (in my mind) among them is that it has tons of cool games.  Rock ’em, Sock ’em Robots found me winning a streak against Chirag (we later found out that one robot always wins…), and building blocks found Daniel constructing a set of train tracks for his new toy train.  Enjoyment was had by all, especially when it came time to attempt to navigate the train tracks with the little toy… turns out, children’s blocks don’t make the best of rail systems… but given enough time (which we were), people can make anything happen… and after a solid 20 minutes of tweaking and carefully laying out the starting block, we were able to make the trip… or at least, make the train make the trip.