Sunday, June 11, 2023. “Daddy, I’m hungry.” Hmm…there’s no food in this condo. I guess we better fix that.

After briefly discussing our options, we settled on something that should have been obvious. Our first truly Canadian experience: a trip to Tim Horton’s for breakfast! Yes, the same one where we picked up our condo key, only this time we went inside and placed an order. Amber and I each got a breakfast sandwich and a donut, and we both agree: the sandwiches were fine, but the donuts were pretty tasty, especially their sour cream glazed.

Now fully fueled, our next stop was Loblaws for some early trip snacks and breakfast items. As we explored the store and overloaded a small shopping basket, I wondered to myself: Are these prices any good? Who cares! We’re on vacation. We left the store to discover it had started raining steadily. Luckily we didn’t have too far to go to get back to our condo building.

The main item on our agenda for the day was a Toronto Blue Jays game against the Minnesota Twins, but it wasn’t until the afternoon. We decided we had enough time for a trip to Ripley’s Aquarium which was also convenient because it’s right next to the Rogers Centre. It’s a pretty modern place with a lot of fun displays, but the best part for me was the glass tunnels that take you through the main tank on a moving walkway. They also had a tank where guests get to touch stingrays, at least in theory. In reality, most of the rays swim too deep for anyone to reach, but we did each get to cop a feel at least. (I didn’t feel too bad about the abbreviated attempt, as this is something we did get to do in Chicago not that long ago.)

After the aquarium it was time to cross the plaza for the baseball game, but not until after we grabbed a humorous picture for the CN Tower virtual cache. We were supposed to take a picture of ourselves at ground zero, with the observation level of the tower (but not the needle) and something to prove today’s date visible in the photo. How did we do?

While I didn’t love that the tickets were handled through TicketMaster, I much preferred the entry experience of NFC readers rather than scanning barcodes like we’re used to at American Family Field in Milwaukee. Once inside the stadium, we decided to keep lunch simple – chicken strips, french fries, nachos, and of course, poutine! We used the people mover ramp to get up to the 500 level and find our seats about a third of the way up in the top section on the third base side of the infield. Not bad seats for a spur of the moment purchase a few months ago.

Now what about that poutine? The fries were fine, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with gravy on fries. But the addition of the fresh-not-fried cheese curds that were slightly warm…well, we didn’t love it. Perhaps poutine is better when it’s not served from the concession stand at a baseball game? Or maybe it’s just not for us. Either way, we made up for it with popcorn and ice cream later in the game, and those were a hit.

Amber decided she wanted to score the game, so she bought a program and did the first inning or two. Then she asked Mackenzie to to give it a try, and I think that really helped her stay interested in the game. The three of us took turns scoring, though we missed a little bit in the middle while we at our ice cream. Ellie didn’t seem that interested in the game, but she was happy with the steady supply of baseball snacks. Though she did protest a bit about how long it took for us to get some popcorn.

As for the game itself, it turned out to be a pretty good one. We’re not exactly Blue Jays fans, but it was fun to root for the home team in their own stadium. Unfortunately, that was a bit challenging early on. The Jays starter had a rough first inning, with the first six Twins batters reaching base safely before a strike out and a double play ended the inning. By that time they were already down four runs. Both teams traded runs during the middle innings, and the game entered the bottom of the eight with the Twins up 6-4. The Jays must have decided they really didn’t want to get swept in the series, because they led off the bottom of the inning with two singles before a big fly gave them the lead for good and ultimately sent the hometown fans home happy.

Once we got back to the condo, we decided to keep it simple for dinner and make another attempt at the restaurant in the adjacent building. This time I made a reservation, but I don’t think we really need it. The food was pretty tasty, and I got to watch the winning putt on the fourth playoff hole of the Canadian Open. A Canadian won it for the first time in nearly 70 years. This may be the only time in my life I ever found watching golf to be exciting.

Just as I pass the 18 year mark at Epic, we’re ready for the first part of my 15-year sabbatical. Mackenzie and Ellie are coming with us for the first time. Amber has had this idea for years that we should ride across Canada on a train, so we’re finally gonna do it! And maybe all that time on the train will give us a better chance of actually writing about the entire trip rather than getting two and a half days in, falling behind, and then never finishing. Think positive!

Today was all about caching. Our goal was to find the second stage of our trifecta: GCGV0P – Original Stash Tribute Plaque.

First a little history lession for those who don’t know. The Global Positioning System (GPS) was originally used primarily for US military applications. Civilian GPS recievers did exist, but the signals they received where intentionally degraded using a feature called Selective Availability. The relatively low accuracy would have made a game like Geocaching virtually impossible, not to mention turn-by-turn navigation and many other location-based features of today’s smartphones that we take for granted. But pressure started to mount to turn off selective availablity, and the proverbial switch was flipped off on May 1, 2000.

The GPS Stash Hunt began almost immediately after; the first ever stash was hidden just outside Portland, Oregon on May 3, 2000. Several other stashes started popping up across the US and the world. It wasn’t long before participants realized the game needed a better name, so it soon became known as Geocaching. And while that original cache didn’t last that long, some geocachers recognized the importance of honoring where our game began. So they worked together to place a plaque at the location of that first stash, and it’s become a very popular place for cachers to visit.

Now the original stash is more than a three hour drive from our accommodations in Seattle, so we knew it was going to be a full day adventure. To break things up, I spent time last night and this morning planning out a route that would allow us to get some highly favorited caches to find without going very far off our route. I eventually picked out 10 targets to find along the way and expected we would get several more in the area of our destination.

The trip started with one of our longest drives of the day before we stopped outside a Cabella’s for GC961WA – Go Fish! A well-crafted gadget cache that required fishing for numbers to open a combination lock. With that cache completed, we decided to stop into the store to go to the restroom and wound up doing some shopping, too. So much for our schedule…

A few caches later, we hit another highlight of the day: GC57ZJR – Johnny Islands Throne Room. The cache owner requests people not to include photos in their logs, so we didn’t really know what to expect. But with nearly 1,000 favorite points at an 85% clip, we knew it was going to be something good. The cache is actually inside the fence for a pet/garden center, and it soon became obvious why. We rounded the corner of the building to see a full size port-a-potty with a padlock on the door. Getting inside and getting to the log was an adventure that is difficult to describe. There’s a monitor inside that starts playing a video about trying to launch a port-a-potty into the air with rockets! All to give a vehicle for conveying more numbers to open a second locked space – the waste compartment – which contains the log. Who comes up with this stuff?

On the outskirts of Vancouver, we came to GC5RCB5 – Pinball Wizard. It wasn’t much to look at it, but it was fun taking turns using a pinball plunger to launch the small container out of a PVC pipe. We also did a few well-designed multi caches in this area before we finally crossed over into Oregon.

After a few more caches in Portland (they were fine, but not great), we were onto the final approach. As the roads got slower and more winding, Amber and the girls opted to close their eyes to avoid any potential for feeling sick, so I sort of had the last few minutes of the drive to myself. We arrived on the scene about 5:30pm, which was a few hours later than we’d originally hoped, but not so late it was a problem. There was a pair of cachers just leaving the area who gave us tips about where to find the ammo can for the original stash as well as Un-Original Stash (GC92) placed after the original original stash was destroyed. A few other people arrived while we were still onsite, including an older couple from Iowa and a pair of Aussies. It’s amazing how this game can bring so many people from all over the world to one random location on earth!

We grabbed a few more caches in this area before starting the long drive back to Seattle. We got back about 11pm. Our final stats for the day:

• 13 caches including two multis, a letterbox, and a challenge
• 3 favorite points awarded
• 7 new counties
• Approximately 15 hours and 500 miles on the rental car
• 2 failed attempts to eat at A&W before we finally found one that was open
• 2 of 3 stages of the trifecta completed!

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!

We were out of the hotel before 8:30 this morning to catch a…you guessed it…train. Only for the first time on the trip, this train took us to a boat! That boat took us to the small town of Bauen so we could hike from there to Seelisberg along the eastern portion of Lake Lucerne known as Unersee.

This was probably our last significant hike of the trip with a duration of a few hours and a climb of about 1400 feet. The weather has turned very warm in the last day or two with highs in the mid-90s, so we tried to start a bit earlier to avoid the hottest part of the day. Most of the climb came in the first third of our route, so that part was pretty challenging. Things leveled off somewhat after that and even started descending as we got closer to Seelisberg. It was 80° when we started our climb around 10am and temps topped out in the mid-80s before we were done. The elevation and the fact that much of the trail was in the shade both helped us stay relatively comfortable despite the weather.

We had our choice of transportation back to Lucerne once we reached Seelisberg. We could either take a bus and a train to get back faster, or a funicular and a boat which would take longer but would undoubtedly be cooler. Which do you think we chose?

We bought funicular tickets shortly after we got to the station and boarded almost immediately to head down to Treib. There we had a late lunch at one of the busiest restaurants of the whole trip. I had something basic, but Amber tried a really interesting deconstructed salad that included a variety of different items including sausage. most parts had some kind of vinegar finish, but she really liked it.

Our waitress was running herself ragged in the heat (did I mention all the tables were outside?), but she seemed to enjoy coming to our table (in fact she told us so) because we weren’t dissatisfied with the speed of her service like everyone else. So after we split a giant ice cream dessert (hey, we already hiked four miles), I made sure to leave her a nice tip. All I had was US dollars at that point, but she seemed thrilled anyway. Tipping is not expected here like it is in the US, so we’ve only done it when the service was really good and this certainly qualified despite the attitude of her other patrons.

Our ice cream finished, it was time to board the boat back to Lucerne. It took almost two hours, but we were able to stand and then sit outside in the shade where we could feel the cool breeze over the water. It was definitely the right choice for a hot day!

The boat ride ate up the rest of our afternoon, so we went straight back to the hotel to shower and figure out where to have dinner. We settled on an Italian place called La Cucina, and made a reservation with the plan to splurge a bit. We ordered a bottle of wine and each got different veal dishes. Amber’s was better, but mine was still good. For dessert, Amber got mango-passion fruit sorbet and I got Lindt chocolate mousse. Yum!

Waiting on the weather finally paid off! We had plans to go to at least two mountaintops during our time in Lauterbrunnen, but the forecast has been cloudy at higher elevations for our first three days here. Today the weather finally cooperated with sunny skies pretty much everywhere in the region so we took the opportunity to go up to Jungfraujoch.

But the story actually starts last night when I was trying to purchase the tickets. Our travel passes don’t cover this, though they do get us a discount. I was trying to buy the necessary tickets, and the first credit card I used wanted to send me a text for verification. Ok, I’ve received texts while in Switzerland already, this shouldn’t be a big deal. Except the text never arrived. So I tried a second time with the same result before switching to another card, only to have it declined due to fraud protection. After about 40 minutes and a conversation with two different people at Chase and Visa, I was I finally able to get the purchase to go through. Luckily that meant I had nothing to worry about this morning.

So what is Jungfraujoch? It’s the highest train station in Europe at 3,454 meters (about 11,332 feet). It sits on a saddle between the Mönch and Jungfrau summits. It took us two trains to get there, with the second one traveling mostly through a tunnel in the side of the mountain. Once you get up there, it’s a really over the top experience designed to get tourists to spend more money (as if the tickets weren’t already enough), but it’s also a really awesome experience, too.

We started by going outside on the platform at the observatory. It was pretty chilly up there, but nothing we haven’t experienced at home. Lots of people were milling around taking ridiculous photographs, and we might have been two of them. Next we went back inside to find our highest elevation cache ever. (Every Switzerland cache up to this point had probably broken our previous record from somewhere in Nebraska, but this crushed it.) Next we walked through the ice palace. We originally thought this was all man made, but the further we went the more it looked like the space had actually been carved out of the glacier. Our last cold attraction was the chance to walk up a rather slippery slope to the plateau area which is visible via the weather webcam.

We had a few more things to take care of before catching a train back down. First was a quick cafeteria style lunch (nothing special). Then we intentionally allowed ourselves to be sucked into the tourist trap that is Lindt Chocolate Heaven. I’m not telling how many truffles we bought…

With our chocolate desires taken care of (again), it was time to catch the next train out of there. The altitude wasn’t making either of us too uncomfortable, but we did feel a little off. The halfway point of a our journey back to Lauterbrunnen was the Kleine Scheidegg Station. We stopped here for a little extra time in order to complete the Grand Tour cache highlighting Jungfraujoch. It turned out to be further away than we were expecting, so we got a nice little walk in. I think this is when we both got a light sunburn. We decided to take a different route back from there, so we stopped in Grindelwald to explore a bit. This was mostly uneventful, but we’ll be back tomorrow for some more adventurous stuff.

We capped off the evening back in Lauterbrunnen with dinner at Weidstübli. We had our first cheese fondue experience, but we were both a little disappointed because it didn’t exactly impress. The Lauterbrunnen sausage, on the other hand, was quite good.

Most of our trip is through regions of Switzerland that speak German as their primary language. But one of our options from Lauterbrunnen was a day trip into the French-speaking region for cheese, a castle, and chocolate. After the hiking yesterday, we wanted something a little less intense, and this day trip seemed to fit the bill. We planned out the timing for the trains we’d need take the night before, and decided to take advantage of our hotel’s picnic lunch service so we didn’t have to specifically schedule a stop and could just eat whenever we got hungry. We grabbed a quick breakfast in the morning, picked up our lunches from the front desk, and then hit the road. Er…train.

A few hours later, we arrived at La Maison du Gruyère to learn about (and taste!) their cheese. Our travel passes got us in free. The visit started with an audio guide (a cow named Cherry) who told us all about how humans ensure she produces quality milk so they can turn it into quality cheese. There were smelling samples of many of the things cows eat that ultimately affect the way the cheese tastes. Some of them were quite pleasant (mostly flower varieties) and others were kind of gross on their own. We got to see the machines and highlights of the process to make the cheese, then things wrapped up with a view into the aging cellars where they can store up to 7000 wheels of Gruyère AOP. We each got three pieces of different ages to sample. I liked the oldest best (it was the saltiest), while Amber liked the middle option.

With the cheese portion of our day complete, next we climbed up the hill to Gruyères village. Our destination was the Château de Gruyères. On the way up, we worked out the details for a letterbox cache that’s part of the Grand Tour series of caches at popular destinations across Switzerland. (The one in Appenzell that gave us so much trouble was also part of this series.) We got stuck at one point looking for a date required to open the cache box. Amber finally decided that some squiggles must be it, and it turned out she was right.

With the cache found, we continued to the castle. It was cool to see the inside and learn a little bit of its history. The castle was home to many different artists over its last couple hundred years, so most of what was on display inside was artwork. That might be ok to a point, but it was mostly from the last few decades, and some of it was really weird (think flowers-with-hands-for-stems-that-are holding-a-baby-faced-sun sort of weird). Not exactly our cup of tea. (And we liked it so much we forgot to take a picture.)

By this point we were hungry, so we settled down in a small park and broke out our lunches. Ham and cheese sandwiches, apples, candy bars, and water. Butter probably wouldn’t have been our first condiment choice for the sandwiches, but it was better than expected. We discovered that the water was “with gas” which is kind of gross, but we were pretty pleased overall considering how easy this was for us.

Then the chocolate! A quick two trains after lunch took us to Broc to visit Maison Callier. The tour started with a humorous elevator ride that took us down approximately 18 inches. Yes, really. It continued through a series of eight rooms, each with a portion on our audio guides supplemented by interactive displays, and the door to each subsequent room opened automatically when it was time to move on. Every person on the tour had their own audio unit in their own language. This initial part on the history of chocolate was a bit cheesy (wait, wasn’t that earlier?) but it was also really well done. The audio units were pretty cool because once this guided part was over, we were able to go to our choice of individual stations and hold the unit near a scan point (probably NFC) to hear the relevant content.

We listened to most of the optional audio stops and tasted a few ingredients like almonds and hazelnuts, before we broke down and skipped to the reason we were there: the chocolate tasting! Seven or eight flavors later, there was only one we didn’t like very much (marzipan and orange). The rest were delicious! Finally we had to decide what to buy to take home (or at least out of the store). We managed to limit ourselves to just six chocolate bars and two boxed assortments.

The last few trains of the day where uneventful, but gave us time to pick a spot for dinner in Interlaken. Amber chose a place called Hüsi Bierhaus. We tried a couple of local beers on tap, and the food was pretty good, too. Amber had mac and cheese with bacon, and I had the “mega bratwürst” which was extremely tasty. After dinner, we caught the last train of the day back to Lauterbrunnen.

Goodbye, Appenzell! There’s a very slim chance we’ll ever see you again, but we took lots of photos to remember you, so don’t feel bad, OK?

The agenda for today was all about Liechtenstein, but it was a travel day which required strategic planning to make sure we did not have to haul our suitcase and the two hiking packs around while exploring the city of Vaduz on foot. So we took a series of trains, one of which included a crazy guy ranting at everyone in German. We really had no idea what he was saying, but I think we looked at each other like, “Is this guy off his rocker?” And honestly, the answer seemed to be yes based on the reactions of other people around us. Amber: “Now our experience is complete.”

Once we split from crazy guy, we stopped at Sargans train station. Why stop in Switzerland when our destination was in Liechtenstein? Because that station has luggage lockers where we could stash all the big stuff and transfer a few key items to a more typical backpack for the day. From there we took a bus from Sargans into Vaduz to go exploring.

One of the first things you notice in Vaduz is the castle part way up the mountainside to the east. I had forgotten that it’s not open to the public because it is the actual home of the current prince, but we decided to climb up anyway. Some of these slopes rivaled our hike from yesterday, but this climb was over much quicker. We were able to get close enough for a good look at the castle as well as some great views out over the top of Vaduz and the valley on either side.

We spent more time walking around the city finding some caches. Nothing too complicated today, but the most interesting took us to a covered pedestrian/cyclist bridge over the Rhine River between Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Imagine that…a bridge between two countries where you can freely walk back and forth with no fence to pass through and one to approve your presence!

Next it was time for lunch. We picked a place called Made in Italy, partly just to see if it measured up to what we remembered from 2010. The owner was clearly Italian, so of course it was great!

By then it was just about time to leave Liechtenstein and head for our next hotel. But before we left, I wanted to get a pressed penny. Well, of course it wasn’t a US penny, it was a €0.05 coin. And rather than costing $0.51, it set us back €4.05 (about $4.50)! With that taken care of, we caught the bus back to Sargans, grabbed the rest of our bags, and boarded a series of hot and crowded trains that weren’t much fun. By the last train of the day, we were finally starting to cool down again when we met another couple from the US on their 18 day honeymoon. And I thought 12 days was going to be expensive…

We wrapped up the day with dinner at our hotel in Lauterbrunnen. Pizza for me and Rösti for Amber. Very tasty! We also realized the weather outlook for the next few days doesn’t look great for visiting mountain tops, but that’s why we came prepared to be flexible. It looks like the agenda for tomorrow will be more hiking, this time around Lauterbrunnen Valley.

Amber said she wanted to do several hikes during this trip, so I made sure to come prepared with multiple options. My choice for this morning was of moderate difficulty and was supposed to take around two and a half hours. We’d hike up to a summit, then catch a cable car back down. Doesn’t sound too bad, right?

What if I told you the route from Schwende Station to Ebenalp included a climb of 2,500 feet? That sounds a little scary, and it probably was a bit more than either of us were originally expecting. But the trail was well-maintained and we made good time despite some sections that had us huffing and puffing. We were on our own for about the first half, then we caught up with some other groups and played leapfrog the rest of the way up. We had some great views over the valley, and passed through a cave near the end. We were pretty well spent by the time we got to the top, but we can look back now and say it was a pretty reasonable hike for us.

The climb ended at the Berggastgaus Guesthouse where we had an interesting lunch to help us refuel. I played it safe and got a breaded pork cutlet with french fries, while Amber took a risk and got something I can’t remember how to spell. It was a pasta dish with sausage, but the pasta was a little too onion-flavored for her liking.

With lunch taken care of, we had one last objective before catching the cable car back down. We worked on a multicache that required gathering numbers from nearby hiking trail signs. This was a little tricky with the translation from German, but we were able to get there and make the find without too much trouble. We watched a few paragliders take off as we came back toward the cable car station, then bought our tickets down so we could catch a train back to Appenzell.

The rest of the afternoon was spent finding all those caches at which we’d failed so miserably the day before (and dodging raindrops). It’s amazing what a full nights sleep will do for your geosenses! We even managed to work our way through that field puzzle, though I’m not sure we actually took the intended route to get there. We also visited the Appenzeller Bier brewery, and while we weren’t able to do a tasting as we’d hoped, we did get to buy beers and drink them while we listened to their audio tour.

We rounded out the evening with dinner at our hotel since it was supposed to have one of the better restaurants in town. We opted to sit outside despite the rain which was mostly pleasant until it picked up just before dessert and started coming in around the edges. This was probably our best meal yet with both of us really enjoying our selections.

One last thing…

We’re sitting in the slowest TGI Friday’s ever in the Atlanta airport, but all is going well so far (other than the glacial pace of this place). The wait gives me a moment to post our departure pic from earlier, and lay out the general plan for the trip.

Unlike the Iceland trip that was often planned down to the minute, our time in Switzerland will be a lot less structured. (The waitress just came by to let me know they are out of what I ordered.) We know where we are staying and when, but each area has a list of possibilities that we’ll pick from based on how we feel. (Turns out they found an extra sandwich in a back corner or something, so I got my original order after all.) Hopefully I’ve put together enough notes for this approach to work out. We’ll find out soon enough! We have another hour before boarding our flight to Zurich, but Delta tells me our checked bag is already on board. (The sandwich was kind of meh; I’m sure our trip will be better.) Amber is getting anxious, so it’s time to get out of here. Our next post will likely come from Appenzell tomorrow night. Until then.