Day Trip

I had stayed over with a friend (from the USA) who was now based in Basel, and had enjoyed the previous day with him and his family. Today I was to meet up with another friend from work; the plan was to drive to Strasbourg and spend the day there. He picked me up around 7:00 AM, and soon we were on our way. After leaving Switzerland, we drove on the German side of the border until Kehl. We had not met in a long time and it was nice to catch up with each other during the drive. We crossed the Pont de l’Europe over the Rhine into France and parked the car close to Tour du Bourreau. ...

The plan for today was to spend a day at Innsbruck in Austria and add that to my travel map. I wanted to be back in Zurich that night, so I decided to make a day trip. I had booked my tickets in advance on the Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB or OEBB) on their website at € 19,00 each way (which was a very good price considering that I paid CHF 16.60 each way only to get to Sargans the previous day when I visited Vaduz. As I had seen before when I returned from Milan by train, generally, booking train tickets on SBB was more expensive than booking on Trenitalia / ÖBB / Deutsche Bahn / where possible, even when, the actual train on which you travel is the same. ...

My flight to Zurich from Mumbai arrived on time and I made it out of the airport relatively quickly. I boarded the train from the airport to Zurich Hbf and then took the tram to the hotel to drop off my bags. I could have spent the day relaxing after travel, but instead I had decided to make the most of it by visiting Liechtenstein nearby. The plan was made, and I had booked the train tickets to Sargans just the previous evening on the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) website for CHF 16.60 each way. I took the tram back from the hotel to Zurich Hbf and grabbed some breakfast at Rapido. I boarded the InterCity IC563 which arrived from Basel and was headed to Chur. The train left exactly at 9:37 AM; the next stop was Sargans. ...

The plan for today was to make a day trip to Milan and add Italy to my travel map. I had started thinking about this two weeks before but the train tickets from Zurich to Milan were already quite expensive. So I decided to go by bus. I booked my onward journey on FlixBus for €19,00 and I found a good price of £22.10 on loco2.com for the return by train. My journey would take me over the Gotthard Pass by road and return via the Gotthard Tunnel by rail. The Gotthard Base Tunnel was still under construction and only opened in 2016 so I didn’t get to experience that. ...