Retirement Ramblings

I awoke before the alarm and got ready to go. After the standard hostel breakfast, I made my way to the airport. Things moved along in an orderly fashion, as is the case in Germany, and the plane left on time. It was a 3 ½ hour trip to Reykjavik. This time, we arrived in daylight, so I could see a bit of the terrain from the plane window. What I saw was flat and more brown than green – sort of like moonscape, with pools of water in various places. In the airport, there was very little time between planes for everyone on my flight. We had to go through passport control, and someone had arranged a crazy path of lines through the airport to contain the number of people all trying to get their passports stamped at the same time. One person tried to jump the line, and the “authorities” (who looked like teenage boys) set him straight. People were trying to catch flights to cities all over the U.S. and one or two other places, and WOW Air had delivered more than my plane...

Gumperson’s Law is alive and well in Switzerland! Today dawned bright and sunny – and I had to leave! Oh, well . . . guess I’ll just have to come back! My host was enroute to a commitment of his own, and was able to drop me off at the train station this morning.   I took an 11:00 AM train to Mannheim, and changed trains for the last hour into Frankfurt.   Once again, and with nostalgia, I passed through the Freiburg station. What a wonderful time I had there! The train ride was uneventful, which is, I guess, a good thing.   Once I arrived in the main station, it took a few minutes of getting myself re-oriented before I could get myself on the right underground train to get to the youth hostel where I had stayed at the beginning of my trip and where I had made a reservation – 7 weeks ago – for tonight. There is a big conference or trade show or something on in Frankfurt, so I have a bed in a four-person room. (A single room here would have been quite ...

It rained again today! I guess I’ll just have to come back to Bern – and Interlaken – and perhaps a few other places. The good news is I had yet another museum to go to – the Zentrum Paul Klee. Klee was born here, in a town just outside Bern, and he came back to Bern when the Nazis including his work among the “Degenerate Art” they criticized in the 1930s. So, Bern claims him as one of their own. Someone build a big museum or “center” to house a collection of his works and to serve as place to promote and discuss art. The building itself is worth seeing, even without the art inside! The area around here is hilly, and the center mimics that hilliness. It is three buildings in the shape of hills, and made from steel and glass. Because of the curved shape of the frame, the building comes out of the landscape in a graceful way. It is a modern building, without points and sharp edges. One of the “hills” is where the collection of Klee’s work is displayed; one is a conf...

I had coffee in my PJs and read the “paper” this morning – heaven! My host had a flight to Hamburg and back this morning, so I was alone in the apartment when I woke up. What a delight!   By the time I was showered and dressed, he was back from his flight. The weather looked crummy enough that I carried a raincoat, and went straight to Bern’s history museum, which also has a floor devoted to Albert Einstein, so I could be inside and away from the rain. I decided to start with the Einstein exhibit/museum, which was fascinating! A lot had been donated to the Bern exhibit by Israel – not clear whether it was the government or another museum. The exhibit detailed his life from his birth in Ulm, Germany, to his death in Princeton, New Jersey. The reason it’s in Bern is that Einstein came to Bern to live with another family when his parents moved to Milan after his father’s Munich business failed. He lived here, and did much of his “high school” and higher ed. here ...

Well . . . Interlaken was a bust! It started raining about the time I left the hotel this morning. (Great breakfast on a terrace overlooking majestic, snow-covered mountains!) I went straight to the train station, stored my stuff in a locker, and hoped the rain would pass quickly.   There were two “attractions” I was interested in, other than the general sense of Interlaken: a funicular with great views, and a Tourist Museum (i.e. a museum about tourism in the area since tourism there began). I thought I’d start with the museum, since the rain needed to pass before the funicular would be any good.   Then I realized that today is Monday, when museums are typically closed.   I checked and sure enough, the tourism museum is open from Tuesday through Sunday. So, I wandered around the shops near the train station – quite a few tourist places – and met a lot of other tourists waiting out the rain by doing the same thing. The rain kept on and on – very unli...

Off I went to Ballenberg this morning, after reluctantly checking out of my lovely little room with the great view. I caught a bus at the train station, which took me through a neighborhood – almost a “subdivision” – of chalets (I don’t think of chalets as being in subdivisions, but that’s what this looked like.) on its way to Ballenberg. This is billed as a “living history museum” – and that’s an accurate description.   It is a huge plot of land – I don’t have a way to describe how big it is, but it’s big – maybe Disneyland size. But don’t get the idea of neon and rides and selling things – not at all.   This is a natural environment where great care has been taken to maintain the trees and do farming and plant “typical” vegetables and fruits in gardens on the property. Houses and other buildings from all over Switzerland have been moved to Ballenberg and re-constructed. They are arranged in regions to represent the regions of Switzerland. A great effort...

Here I am on another balcony overlooking yet another beautiful lake!   This time, it’s Lake Brienz, and the balcony is on the 2 nd floor, not the 5 th . (Actually, in U.S. terms, I’m on the 3 rd floor, because the ground floor is zero, not one. And I was on the 6 th floor in Brünnen – but in Switzerland – and Germany – I’m now on the second floor.) It’s a spectacular view – not quite the same as the other because I don’t have the dramatic sweep of the lake, but it’s pretty nice.   The lake is teal – not blue, not green, teal! It’s the most beautiful shade.   I’ve only seen a color like this in a lake in southern Chile – nowhere else that I can think of. Directly across the lake from me are mountains that still have some snow on them, as well as other mountains that have heavy pine forests. So, how I got here: I left Lucerne by train at about 11:00 AM. Actually, I got to the train station right at 11, and the person at the information desk, when I asked how to ge...

This was my day to NOT go to any museums, but instead, to walk around Lucerne. There is a good planned walking tour that hotels give out to guests. Not only did I carry one today, but most of the people on my route also had them under their arms. I started at the Höfkirche, a beautiful church with two spires, that dominates the skyline on one side of Lucerne. It’s particularly beautiful, with a lot of carved wood. Then on to Löwendenkmal, which is a beautiful carving of a lion out of a huge rock.   It was done to commemorate the Swiss soldiers who lost their lives protecting the Tuileries Palace in Paris during the French Revolution.   I’m not sure about the significance of a lion in commemorating this event, but it’s beautiful. By the way, tourists have hit Switzerland – and maybe Europe in general. I could hardly move due to the HUGE group of Chinese tourists at the lion. (And I saw tour groups all over the city today.) From there, I walked back to t...

My goal today was to make it to two more museums to make the museum card worthwhile – and, of course, to see the museums themselves – and I did it! After breakfast, I hustled to the lake short to take a bus to the Verkehrshaus Museum.   The translation is “traffic-house” museum, but it’s really a transportation museum. It’s a HUGE museum – the kind where you take the kids and they have a lot to do while you follow along, look enthusiastic, and probably have some fun yourself. The best description I can come up with is it’s the Sacramento train museum on steroids – AND it’s the same for ALL means of transportation – trains, cars planes, boats, funiculars!   I’ve probably forgotten something, but I DID see both a baby buggy and a skateboard in the exhibit, so consider those means of transportation covered. Since transportation is not necessarily one of my big interests, I’m not sure I would have sought out the museum as such, but . . . one of the things ...

The view was still there when I woke up this morning – and I had to pinch myself to realize it was real. After a really nice breakfast in the hotel dining room, I went back upstairs and enjoyed the view as long as I felt I could, and still leave at check-out time. It occurred to me that, rather than take the train to Luzerne, the lake was right in front of me and I could take the BOAT to Luzerne. So . . . that’s what I did. I got on the boat a little after 11:30 AM, and rode for about two hours – about five stops – to Luzerne.   It was really a treat! The lake is lined with mountains and hills – and the hills have chalets on them.   I kept imagining a loom or a sewing machine in the window of one of those chalets . . . About a half hour before we were to land in Luzerne, it started to rain so those of us sitting outside had to scramble inside for the rest of the trip. It turns out there was a tour group from England on the boat. They were going to spend t...

As I write this, I’m sitting on a 5 th floor balcony, looking out over Lake Lucerne.   Wow! I have on a sweatshirt, because it rained around 5:00 PM, and then just a half hour ago, it became really windy. I want to still be able to enjoy the view, so that’s why I’m wearing a sweatshirt, when earlier today, it was really hot! OK, the story: there was a nice buffet breakfast at the conference center this morning. Afterwards, I got packed up and headed for the bus stop, right in front of the conference center, to take me to the train station in Zug. ( Wish I’d known about this bus line before schlepping luggage the day before, but . . . such is life. That’s happened any number of times this trip.) I bought the right ticket this time, and shortly left for Brunnen. (I continue to be amazed at how many trains are operating here, and how easy it is to get from one place to another. I haven’t waited more than a half an hour for a train going to a destination where...