Day Eleven: The Italian Part

A friend I recently met through Geocaching grew up in Switzerland and was very helpful answering questions as we planned parts of our trip. Based on something she described in one of her emails, the plan for our last full day was to head south. South to the Italian-speaking region. South to the hottest part of the country…

It was kind of a whirlwind tour. We checked out of our hotel in Lucerne around 9am, then caught a pair of trains to take us through the Gotthard tunnel under the alps to Lugano. From there we dropped our luggage in a locker at the station and caught a different train over to Melide to visit Swissminiatur.

Mom, you would love this place! It’s full of over 100 scale models of famous sites around all of Switzerland. There were many we didn’t recognize, but about a half a dozen were for places we did visit during the trip. We tried to look long enough to appreciate the effort of creating it all, but we also didn’t linger since most of the sites weren’t significant to us, and because the temps were already in the mid to upper 90s with heat index closer to 110.

It was lunchtime when we finished, but neither of us were hungry due to the heat. So we did the best thing we could think of and bought some ice cream bars. When we were finished, we realized we had just missed the bus that would have taken us to our second stop of the day: Italy!

Campione d’Italia is an exclave of Italy completely surrounded by the Ticino canton of Switzerland. It’s just over one square mile in area, so why bother to go there? Two reasons, really. First, to be able to say we did it and that we actually returned to a foreign country for the first time. Second and most importantly, to make up for the fact that we knew about geocaching when we went to Italy in 2010, but completely forgot to make it a part of the trip.

Yes, there is one geocache inside that square mile, and that was our destination. The next bus after the one we’d missed wasn’t for another hour, so we decided to walk about 20 minutes to get there instead. This was the hottest walk of the entire trip, but we were able to find the cache and get to an appropriate stop for a bus to get us back to Melide.

Except once we were on the (wonderfully air conditioned) bus, I was just a little too slow on the stop button. So we ended up riding partway into Lugano but away from the train station. We walked from there, but this time we were able to find shaded pedestrian alleys. I spotted someone with a slice of Focaccia pizza and suggested we get some even if we weren’t hungry. We found the shop that sold it, and I was reminded of one our our walks in Italy 9 years ago (minus the heat). We ate them on the rest of the walk to the train station, then retrieved our bags, and caught a train towards Zürich.

That’s where we are now as I write this. The train is mildly air conditioned which would probably make me miserable on any other day, but it feels pretty good right about now. I’m sure we smell pretty ripe, so hopefully no one to sit next to us. We’ll be to Zürich in just over an hour for our last night in Switzerland.

Edit: We ate at our hotel in Zurich tonight and both had Raclette for the first time. We both agreed it was far better than the fondue we tried a few days ago. Also, our room was air conditioned and had a nice mural and a balcony cow!

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