Last week, Greg eased his way back into the working world with a two day work week, leaving us Wednesday through Sunday to enjoy one of those weekly excursions I'd been promised pre-move.
So, while Greg went off to his first day in a new labor force, I hit the guidebooks and came up with Wengen, a tiny village so high in the Alps, you need to board a cog railroad to get there.
When Greg got home and listened to my enthusiastic burbling, he asked, "Did you check the weather forecast for the area?", his smirk belying the innocence of the question.
I checked and the forecast was for ... SNOW! Okay, I do realize this is Switzerland and it snows in winter but this is September. I signed up for autumn leaves, newly harvested apples and orange mums in September - not snow.
Thus, while Greg was off replenishing our dwindling bank account on Tuesday, I again got out the guidebooks. When mein Mann got home, I proudly described Ticino, an area bordering Italy with a Mediterranean climate that supports palm trees. (Of course, that's what they told us about Orcas Island, too - an assertion that was belied by island webcams revealing snow in December.) I sent an email off to a small hotel that boasted its own vineyard, asking for a reservation from Thursday (Greg was getting cheaper) to Sunday.
The hotel didn't email us back until Thursday, when they apologized that they were currently closed. By then, inertia had us in its grip and we were caught up in shopping for all those little extras that make a house a home - like toilet paper.
Meanwhile, I was discovering the pitfalls of having a spouse around 24/7 when you'd had two years of days to yourself. In fact, if Greg asked me one more time which day which set of neatly packaged garbage (paper, cardboard, compost or regular) went to the curb, I was going to have to kill him. My weapon of choice was a heavy glass vase holding sunflowers but smashing it over his head would require carefully sorting the shards into white glass and blue glass, to be deposited into the apropriate bins at the end of our street and the sunflowers ... well, we haven't quite figured out what to do with the compost: we fear we might have to eat it! So, until I can find a cleaner weapon, spending three days in a small hotel room with possible inclement weather is perhaps best avoided.
The weather last week went from sweater weather to jacket weather and back again. One day I even wore a turtleneck!
But Sunday, as I discovered when I woke up at 1100 hours (that's Swiss for 11 A.M.) was a beautiful sunny, short sleeved day. I dragged Greg onto a train for an hour trip to the Rhine Falls, the largest in Europe.
When we got there, we found stairs ... about a billion of them going up one way and down the other. I suspect the existence of a huge rivalry with Zurich as to who can squeeze the most steps into a confined space. Undaunted, I knew that all the walking up and down stairs in my new city would make these stairs a chore of no consequence and indeed I bounced up and down them huffing no harder than an eighty year old woman (as opposed to huffing like an octogenarian when we first moved here.)
Below you will see my carefully composed photos. (Who am I kidding? I can't see a darn thing in that digital window when the sun is bright. I can only point and shoot multiple times and hope for the best. If you want to see really good pictures, go to google images and type in Rhine Falls, Switzerland.)
Of course, all that water made us thirsty and so m'lord and I adjourned to the castle for a flagon of wine.
While we were sitting there, sipping wine and enjoying a last lovely autumn day, I waxed poetic on the beauties of the castle and its awesome setting and offered the opinion that it would have been wonderful to have lived there when it was built.
Greg's response?
"Are you kidding? It was built up here because people were trying to kill you and can you imagine how cold it would be in winter with those stone walls?"
Scientists - they're so romantic!
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