Below is a running journal I kept during the trip to Switzerland. It’s only been slightly edited after the fact. Many of the little sections will have a few photos at the end of it.
Here’s the scenic photos album if you want to skip to that: CLICK HERE FOR PHOTOS
For action photos from the bobsled and skeleton world champs: CLICK HERE FOR PHOTOS
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Alright, so let the adventure begin! The flight to JFK from RDU was exactly as it always is: Short, stuffed into a very tiny plane, and otherwise not bad. Once in JFK I had about a five hour layover. The good thing is that Terminal 4 is seemingly at least a mile long (will check on that later), so it’s a good way to get in some exercise before moving.
After hitting 10,000 steps on the ol’ Garmin, it was time to settle into a spot in the Delta Sky Club. Apparently the Sky Club has become a bit popular, I imagine with various credit cards giving free/cheap access. The food in there is always good and there’s always places to charge your stuff.
Finally, I boarded a plane to Zurich! The thing about that plane…not too many people on it. Delta One was pretty lightly taken up. The “Premier” class area was actually full on booked, but back in Comfort+ I had my own little row that worked out just delightfully. The one thing about me, though, is that I can sleep for exactly two hours on a plane, regardless of how long that particular plane ride is. Given the fact it was basically a red-eye, that wasn’t too idea and at the time of this writing (Monday at 1:00 PM local time) I’m exhausted.
Got my stuff, got on the little train that takes you to the big train station. That was neat, and really something I wish we had more of in the United States. I was able to get my ticket to St. Moritz on the app, though it’s DEFINITELY cheaper if you buy the ticket in advance. Either way, I had a brot and a roll and eventually got on the train to St. Moritz, by way of Chur.
The train takes you around Zurich Lake, and it’s quite a pleasant ride. From there you head towards Landquart and eventually Chur, and that whole ride is just magnificent with tall mountains on either side of the rail car. Even with the little bit of snow on the ground at the level the rails are at, the mountains were completely snow covered along the way.
The amazing thing about the line form Chur to St. Moritz is that it’s almost entirely uphill, but these viaducts and tunnels you wind through were created back in the early 1900s (one tunnel was created in 1903), and when you see the HUGE gap that some of these traverse it really makes you wonder how they were made.
So the trip up is completely breathtaking. It’s a UNESCO world heritage site, and basically at every point you look in any direction and go “what the hell? Really?! And then eventually you just arrive in St. Moritz
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I checked into the hotel here in St. Moritz, it’s called Hauser Hotel, and it’s a small family-owned hotel right in the middle of St. Moritz. My room is relatively small, but mostly because for the first week and a half it’s just me and really it’s being used for showering, writing, uploading photos, and sleeping. But it’s still very cozy and wooden. It’s bigger than my apartment room in Pyeongchang, so I can make it work.
There’s a restaurant here in the hotel, and it’s very good. More importantly though, there’s also a pastry and chocolate shop attached to the hotel. It. Is. Outstanding. So that was my first thing once I got into town was this little hotel. Then I realized that I’d hardly moved in 24 hours (took off at 10:30 AM ET on Sunday, and got here at about that time on Monday). So I went for a walk down to the other part of St. Moritz, the “down the hill” part is what I call it. That’s where the store and things are plus another great bakery! So that was a nice way to get around the town a little.
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Tuesday was my first full day in town. I went to the bobsled track to get my credential, and it was my first time seeing the place in person and if you’re into sports history there’s no better place to go to. The track has been built in the same general way for over a hundred years. It’s followed the same path over that time, and literally anyone who’s anyone has slid on the track. I walked the track, took it all in, then finally got my credential.
On the way back from the bobsled track, by Hotel Kulm there’s outdoor curling and ice skating. I’m not sure why, but I just had to stop and take a few pictures: The sky was right, and there was one game being played with some younger folks, then the other game was being played by some of the oldest curlers I’ve ever seen. But it was just charming!
I really needed some downtime after all of the travel. I walked back down into town because I’d been told there was great pizza down there. But I also wanted to go walk on the giant frozen lake…that lake hosts snow polo while I’m here, but also hosts horse racing, auto racing, snow golf, and a pile of other stuff. It just stays so ice cold up here for so long it’s that solid of a lake.
So I made it down for pizza…while I’m looking at the menu I see an option called “Pizza America”…it has corn on it. Why? Have I been making pizza wrong this whole time?! Anyway, the pizza was alright, relatively inexpensive for here, but I don’t know that it was everything I’d hoped.
While having lunch I got a call form Katie Tannenbaum, the skeleton athlete from the US Virgin Islands, and a longtime friend. There was start reaction testing up on the curling sheet of ice, and that was a fun time. USA’s Kelly Curtis and Andrew Blaser were there, and they’re both just really great people. So it was fun to hang out with them for a bit, then Katie and I went into town and had a coffee and pastries from Hauser before heading down for the opening ceremony.
Opening ceremony was alright…I think I’d hoped for more of a “parade of nations” thing going on, but we didn’t get that. We did get national flags, and something called “Blackout”, which is like blue man group kind of, but dudes with LEDs on them. Look it up, it’s weird.
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Wednesday I decided to make my way to the bobsled track for the final training run for bobsled, in part to shoot that and in part to just get the lay of the land of the track. It was really great seeing some folks I hadn’t seen in a while, and it was fun getting to shoot around the track some. The only downside of this is that for training, there’s almost no downtime in between runs, so you get what you get, then hustle to the next spot. But I did find some great spots, we’ll see how they work out over the course of the next week or so.
Once training was over I still had plenty of light to get down and walk a mile on the frozen lake around where they’re getting ready for snow polo. Remember earlier when I talked about how when you look around on the train everything is amazing? St. Moritz is that, all the time. Literally everything here is gorgeous, anywhere you look there’s a mountain backdrop, and everything being snow-covered just makes it that much better.
After my lake walk I stopped to take some photos of the church in town, got some nice sunset photos and a selfie, shot some photos of some folks horseback riding on a little horse ring in town (again, this is a pretty well-off place). Also, I got distracted by some ducks because they were pretty awesome looking and love me some ducks!
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Thursday was the first day of actual competition. It was great to see some folks I haven’t seen in a while, and for some of these folks it may be the last time I see them for a very long while. A lot of athletes retire after the Olympics, but with St. Moritz the year after a lot of people decided to hold off until after these World Champs.
The competition was great. On the men’s side Matt Weston threw down some monster runs and took the lead. On the women’s side it was a little closer.
The one thing about shooting competition here compared to Lake Placid is that having not been here before I’m not 100% sure where I can go. Making it more complicated Is that there’s lots of signs for TV and you can’t be on/near those.
Today I was in front of a BMW sign that I knew wasn’t on TV. However I still got a brief talking to about it, but was able to work around after that. The second heat of each race I shot from Horse Shoe, where there’s a bar and giant deck. They’ve added a mammoth grandstand on top, which for skeleton wasn’t too busy but I imagine for bobsled it’s going to be just packed. It’s a big party area there, and it’s a pretty neat atmosphere I’m told.
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On Friday we had the final heats of men’s and women’s skeleton. To be quite honest it was a full work day with not a lot of fun and shenanigans. With these busy event times if you’re doing any kind of photography you basically shoot one heat, find another spot and get ready to shoot the next heat. While I’m here, however, I’m also trying to do post-race interviews so it’s three heats of photos then one heat of standing around trying to chat with folks.
Thankfully the IBSF head media person, Angela, is outstanding at what she does and does such a wonderful job handling all of the IBSF media things. She’s also been vital to me getting stuff done with interviews: The finish dock is pretty locked down and otherwise rather hectic so she can go grab folks for me. I’d be a tick lost without her.
I’m also, as best as I can tell, the only English language media person here. So it’s a little daunting trying to get folks after they’ve gone through TV, German print and radio, and everything else.
Anyway, the skeleton races were fun! The men’s race was a blowout, Matt Weston won handily. But the women’s race was won by just a hundredth of a second. It was amazing!
The hard thing about this season has been that there’s a decent number of people who are retiring after this season. It’s one of the reasons I really wanted to be out here, I didn’t get the chance to see some folks do amazing things at the Olympics, so my hope is that I’ll at least get to see them slide a historic track one last time.
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Saturday was the first day of bobsled, and it was mostly a different vibe. The start house was completely locked down, so photos at the top were a little tough to get. But there were still really great pre-race photos to get of fans, and of folks up at the top of the start there to watch.
Women’s Monobob kicked things off. It’s a new-er type of sliding so the sled count was a little lower. We had 20, which is the most of the season, but realistically there was only a few sliders in contention for the gold. Like in skeleton I shot the start, one of the really big loud exciting parts of a bobsled race. The crowd, especially for the two-man race in the afternoon, was exceptional.
As I did before, I shot the second heats in Horseshoe, the most famous curve of the course. Nothing terribly exciting happened, save for a few crashes corner-out due to some added pressure. That said, I did meet some folks form Lichtenstein which, if you know me at all you know that was super exciting. Very nice folks, as everyone I’ve met from there is.
During the break between Monobob and two-man bobsled I went back up to the Gunter Sachs Lodge, had a sausage, bread and a Coke and sat in the sun for a while. It was delightful! The sun out this way keeps things kind of warm despite how cold it is. The problem is, the second the sun goes down or you end up in the shade it gets crazy, crazy cold! Either way, it was a nice break.
At the end of the day, however, it was still a pretty busy work day!
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Sunday was the final two runs of sliding for the week, with the Monobob and two-man bobsled third and fourth races.
The races themselves were a tick boring, they were all but over and done by the end of the third heat. I did find a nice spot to shoot by Bridge curve, there’s a little bit of sun there to keep you warm which is nice, mostly because almost every spot to shoot along the track are shaded and cold.
The two-man bobsled race ended relatively early, with enough time for me to get back to the hotel for a little bit before the 6:00 PM medal ceremony. It was nice to do some work on my little hotel desk and relax before taking care of photos.
Aside from the comforts of the hotel desk, there was also the fact I was able to get post-sliding/pre-medals cake, which is really, really nice!
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Monday was my first real full day off since getting to St. Moritz. I spent the morning cleaning up some photos and reports and stuff like that, but then decided I was going to do something fun. There’s something called the Corviglia Funicular, and it takes you from St. Moritz-dorf up to Chantarella, which is kind of up the mountain. Then you take the next funicular from Chantarella to Corviglia.
Now, I didn’t know exactly how to ask the question in German about how to get on the Funicular and get to where I was going. So I saw some stairs to the left of the station and thought “I’m going to just go walk these stairs and take in some views.” After about 45 minutes of stairs and hills, I accidently ended up at Chantarella. So from there it was onto the Funicular up to Corviglia.
Corviglia is basically a spot on top of a mountain where there’s a lot of skiing. And I mean a LOT of skiing. There’s a couple little restaurants, including the Quattro Bar, and then otherwise it’s just a ski spot. There’s a ski store, ski rentals, lessons, etc. The mountain looks like, if you’re into skiing, an outstanding time. There’s a lot of trails that leave from Corviglia and the place is just a huge hub for skiers.
I had a burger up top at the Quattro Bar, walked around and took all of the sights from the top of this mountain, then eventually went back down to Chantarella.
Later this week I’ll likely do the trip again, but this time with Lauren and finishing the trip to Piz Nair via cable car. I love mountains, I love awesome views, so I feel like it’s an ideal situation.
After the trip I stopped at Hauser to get a layer cake and some truffles and hot chocolate, then went down for a proper lake walk. The lake is still very frozen, and had just held the snow polo world championships. It’s now being set up for White Turf, the horse racing events on the oval they build out on the lake.
After looking at some of the horse racing gates and things of that nature I took a nice walk around the whole lake, which I quite honestly couldn’t ever get enough of. I did spend some time sitting out in the sun and enjoying the mountain views, which was a solid way to end the day.
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After a day off it was back to the track on Tuesday to shoot some of practice. On tap for this week is parabobsled, women’s bobsled and four-man bobsled. The numbers are still a little thin on that side of things thanks to a post-Olympic season with retirements and budget cuts and whatnot, so a full day worth of sliding got cut into just a half of a day of sliding.
While I’m always for more sliding, it was nice to be able to pop back into town and see some sights. This time I swung by the leaning tower, which leans more than the one in Pisa! It was originally erected in the mid-1500s and ever since then they’ve had trouble with it. There’s been various attempts to get it more upright, including removing all of the clock and bells in it, and by the turn of the previous century there were plans to demolish it. Someone decided it was better as it is, and a few steps have been taken in the 1900s to get the thing settled so it won’t fall over, but also just kind of stay as it is. While you can’t notice it from everywhere in town, there are some great angles (especially from the curling sheet near Kulm Hotel) where it’s super noticeable.
So while I’m there taking in history, I get a note form my friend Ed, who is now working for the BBC. They were looking to talk to someone for a brief spot on the BBC World News sports portion, and apparently I was their guy!
Here’s the problem: I’d been outside in the cold all day, and apparently while I was on the mountain the day before I got more than my share of sun. So when I say that my face was red, I’m not at all exaggerating.
When you do a BBC Sport interview it’s kind of funny, you never see the people on the other end. You hear everyone talking to you, then they go into the interview but you never see them. The trick to looking right into the camera for that is to pull the screen of yourself in front of the camera and just talk to yourself.
So that aired later in the evening, and it was cool to see that folks actually saw it. The rest of the evening was a walk on the lake (never gets old), a stop at Backerei-Bad for the umpteenth time and a dinner pulled from the Coop supermarket. That and a lot of photo editing, which is kind of needed because the combination of the all-ice track and the weird sun through the shades makes everything a tinge blue.
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Wednesday was my last full day off of this trip until after bobsled. I took the morning to just organize my life a little bit. After that, I walked down to Celerina, where the bobsled track ends. Celerina, like St. Moritz, is very old and relatively expensive. It’s cheaper to be down there than up in Moritz, but at the same time there’s far less dining and shopping options. That said, there’s some great older architecture there.
One thing I ran into was the Kirche San Gian, which is an old church built in the mid 1400s. It was hit by lightning sometime in the 1600s then kind of just left without a roof. There’s a cemetery near it, and it’s sort of up on this hill. The hill’s pretty big and is kind of a ledge-type-thing that runs along the middle of the valley. I found a little foot trail there and followed it a while, and eventually it walks you past various old wooden benches that have remarkable views of the valley.
So I spent some time taking things in there, checked out Bel Taimpel, which is another of the three Reform churches in Celerina, then headed back up the hill. On the way up the folks from the Cresta Run were finishing up the big British Armed Forces race there.
For those that don’t know, the Cresta Run is where the sport of skeleton was born. Generally speaking the two sports are very similar. You slide headfirst down a sliding track on a sled that is under your stomach. However, Cresta sliding is a little different in that the sleds are a tick different and go down a different track. That said, The Run was used in both the 1928 and 1948 Olympics for skeleton and is otherwise hand-built in the same way that the bobsled track is.
I checked out the sleds for a bit (the course, and the club, is all private but there’s a spot where the sleds are set to go to the top that you can view from). Came back to Hauser for a quick snack (cake and hot chocolate), then headed down to the lake.
Today’s the day I realized that the parking garage at Badrutt’s Palace actually goes all the way down to the lake at this overlook that has some stairs down to the lake itself. So I took that, walked the lake for a bit, then headed into St. Moritz-bad for some sightseeing there. To be quite frank, there’s not as much to see down there, but it’s got some great places to walk around and it does have some small monuments to the 1928 and 1948 Olympics, so I was super into that.
At this point I’m 25,000 steps into the day, and have decided to call it a day. I walked up the hill, stopped at Backerei-bad for a mandel-bretzel and a cookie, stopped at Coop for some lip balm, then sauntered my way back to the hotel.
I DID get my first Doner Kebab. Those things are really good, and I regret not having more of them!
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Thursday was the first day of competition for the IBSF Para Bobsled World Championships. The event was held in the morning on Thursday and Friday, and I already had plans for Friday morning so I made it a point to be extra diligent about my work on Thursday.
After sliding was over I went back into town, got changed and headed back down to the lake to just walk the lake. It was great, as always. There’s something kind of soothing about just walking a giant frozen lake, looking around, seeing mountains covered in snow and it being relatively quiet. So I walked another mile and a half loop there, then headed back up.
Of course a stop at Bäckerei-bad was needed. But then after that I stopped at the Endagin Museum, that had all sorts of neat stuff about the life and culture of the region from years past. The collection is from a guy who lived in Celerina years ago, and slowly collected pottery, cookware, bedding, and eventually entire rooms (including a great hall type thing with family crests on them. Nice thing about it was that there was an audio tour that you could use on your phone that worked very well. I learned a lot about folks from the 1600s onward in the region. As it’s been pointed out, I do love a good fifth grade field trip and this was definitely one of those things.
After a pop back to the hotel to dump off some stuff and eat a mandelbretzel from Bäckerei-bad, I headed down to pick up Lauren from the train station. She’d come up for the last week of competition plus some other Swiss shenanigans later on, and had the exact same flight/trin travel and whatnot that I had. The train travel is so easy in Switzerland that it was just as easy for her.
We got her settled into the small room at Hauser, which took a little bit of effort to rearrange, and headed down onto the lake for a quick lake walk. After that it was (another) stop at Bäckerei-bad for me then a pop in to Coop for Lauren for food and supplies.
We did dinner at the hotel, which was amazing. There was a couple next to us with a very good dog who laid nicely next to everyone while they ate. Something I noticed over the course of my time in St. Moritz is how cool everyone is about dogs: They’re in restaurants, supermarkets, just kind of wherever.
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Friday morning we headed back to the Funicular to head up the mountain, this time with the stated goal of taking the cable car all the way to the top of Piz Nair. We get there, ask the guy for two tickets to Piz Nair, he gets on the phone right quick for something, then just sells us our tickets.
So we take the Funicular up, the first stop isn’t much to write home about, I’d walked it a couple days prior so clearly it’s not much of an effort. The next part to Corviglia, as usual, was an easy little ride up. It’s steep, but with very nice views of the valley below.
So we get to the top, walk around Corviglia for a little bit, then go to get on the cable car to Piz Nair. It’s a tick windy where we are, and there’s a sign with a big ! that basically says “pedestrians only”. No problem, we’re not skiing, so we mosey our way over to the door, which doesn’t open. We went back and asked about the cable car and was informed that yes, it was running. Come to find out the door itself was stuck, which was an omen of things to come.
We get in finally, get on the cable car and we’re the only two going up. “Cool, going to have the top of the mountain ourselves” I think as we start the cable car up from the 7,500’ or so we’re at up to the 10,000’ summit of Piz Nair. As we ride up, the wind is getting harder, as it tends to do at higher elevations. There’s a point when you’re taking the car that it slows down dramatically, which coupled with the wind did give us a moment. But we pulled in, got docked, and go toff.
At the top of Piz Nair is a nice restaurant where I got a hot chocolate. There’s also an Ibex statue, and a bunch of great places to look at the skyline. It’s amazing how high up you actually are at this point, as every mountaintop around you appears to be right at your level. There’s one ski trail that starts there, basically the “very top” ski spot.
I took in the views, ten decided it was time to head down. We get on the cable car…and it’s not going. The dude pushes some buttons, waits a bit, then tries again. Nothing. The buzzing is a high wind warning thing, but apparently we’re supposed to be able to go down through that, which makes sense given that we got up there.
Eventually we’re told to get back into he restaurant, hang out and they’ll have it fixed shortly. Well, they didn’t get it fixed shortly.
We had told our waitress earlier that I had an event to get to in the afternoon, so after about an hour of waiting she pops out to see how they’re doing and they have no idea. Great. So we ask her “what happens if the cable car doesn’t go back down” and we were informed that if that’s the case the giant snow trail prep vehicle comes all the way up the mountain, gets them, and takes them back down.
So I’m bummed, there’s no way I think I’m going to get to the women’s bobsled race in the afternoon. But at about 11:30 the waitress makes a call, then informs us the “SOS” folks are going to come get us. Basically when you fall skiing and break however many bones, the guys who show up with the little sled to pull you back down the mountain? Those guys.
They show up 30 minutes later in a five-seat UTV with three guys in it. The UTV has snow treads on it. We hop in and holy crap is it a steep start. We basically followed the ski trail down, and man it was wild. It was crazy windy, with snow blowing in our face and everything. At one point we get up to this ridge, the driver slows way down and seemingly everyone leans up to peer over to see what’s on the other side of the ledge. Eventually they feel confident enough to go down the hill, and eventually we make it back.
Now if you ask me, this was a once in a lifetime adventure that I couldn’t believe happened. Lauren…she could have done without a good portion of that. But either way it was definitely a once I lifetime thing that happened!
I got to the bottom of the hill, we hustled to the bobsled track and got there with about 15 minutes before the first sled went down. Perfect timing!
The women’s race that day was good, three Germans leading Kaillie Humphries, the lone American in contention. This was also Lauren’s first bobsled experience: She hung out at the start for a big before walking down to Horseshoe to check out the party.
I joined her for the second heat. She likened it to the “Quidditch World Cup” from Harry Potter: Lots of flags, lots of languages, and people seem to be all having a really great time.
The remainder of the day included some relaxing, a walk on the lake, and dinner at Banfi’s, a little Italian place down by Bäckerei-bad.
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Saturday was a busy day for me: Women’s bobsled final runs in the morning, four-man first heat in the afternoon. The women’s race was pretty pedestrian as far as covering it. The race itself was great, with Kim Kalicki rallying to win over teammate Lisa Buckwitz, and Kaillie Humphries won bronze.
I headed back up the hill for the first heat of four-man and ran into my first issue with photography basically all Championships. A guy had bought a ticket and moved down to a spot he wanted to shoot at from the fan side of the fencing. That’s fine, but it was right where the IBSF had told us we could shoot the start from.
So I move into my place, and this guy is upset. He doesn’t understand why I can’t go somewhere else. I inform him that over the course of my two weeks at the track (this was his first time there all championships) I’d been in that same spot for every first heat, because again that’s where we were told we could be. So he moves way up, and decides he’s going to lean *way* over into the shot of me and the Italian gentleman standing behind me.
The Italian fella and this other guy get into a pretty big shouting match. In the meantime, a woman standing immediately to my right offers to give him that spot, so I can shoot over his shoulder and then the Italian gentleman can shoot over my shoulder. This was the original idea I had, but hey what do I know?
So that worked out, the racing was good. Went down to Horseshoe for the second heat, hung out with Lauren and my friend Marina who lives in Switzerland. It was some great racing on Saturday and led to a great finish on Sunday.
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Sunday morning was free play time, and both Lauren and I spent a good portion of that time getting packed up, heading down to the lake for our final lake walk in St. Moritz, and stopping at Bäckerei-bad and the Coop one more time to get supplies and whatnot.
I headed to the track, Lauren went and did some shopping. It was chilly in the morning, but the sun popped out for the afternoon. Friedrich won the race, beating Brad Hall and Emils Cipulis, both of whom tied for silver. The silver for Great Britain was their first in four-man bobsled since 1939, so it was a pretty big deal.
There was an Omega race after that which I decided to skip. Why? Because Lauren and I were going sledging!!! It’s basically Natural Track Luge, which I love already: You take the train from St. Moritz to Preda (about 25 minutes), rent a sled, then walk down to the start and slide about 5 ½ kilometers (just over 3.1 miles) to Bergün. Along the way you slide under some of the really nice viaduct style train bridges and things like that. You can go as fast or slow as you like (I got up to about 25 mph at the checkpoint they had) and it’s truly a great time.
My only regret is that we didn’t have more time for sliding. Given that we had to finish packing, I had to write up a bobsled result post and upload photos, we only really had time for one run. The problem is the train drops you off, you slide down to the finish, walk to the train station in Bergün (which is a lovely town!) and then have to wait like 45 minutes for the next train. If there was a quicker option back to the top, we’d have done that and done it again.
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Monday morning we were up early and we headed right to the train station because it was time for the Glacier Express! The Glacier Express is a train that’s existed for a while and is a train that runs between St. Moritz and Zermatt (where the Matterhorn mountain is). It truly goes along the Swiss Alpiest of the Swiss Alps.
We decided since we were doing this once and only once, we’d spring for “Excellence Class”, basically something even nicer than first class. We were greeted by a concierge who got our bags on board and were seated in our spot in a car that had only 20 seats and a full bar at the end of it. The ride in that class comes with a five course meal, all of which was outstanding.
And really, just a fancy train ride alone would have been very nice. However, the views. My goodness, the views. You go up and down, through giant 15km tunnels, over some of the massive bridges we’d slid under a day prior, went up some massive mountains and down into some very deep valleys.
My favorite part was a stop above the ski town of Andermatt. Basically the town is at the floor of the valley and there’s a road that you can ski back down to the valley from WAY up. It’s a big plateau up that way where the train goes over, it’s above where the trees can grow, and is just snow for as far as the eye can see. It was magnificent.
But the whole trip was like that, just one amazing view after another. The only downside is that photos don’t always do the trip justice. Because of the combination of sunny glare in the train car and just weird angles to take pictures from, it’s hard to properly convey just how stunning the views were. I did my best, but it was a challenge.
After the train ride we got to Zermatt and walked to our hotel in town. The town is “car-free”, but is full of little electric cabs, busses, and whatnot. Either way, it’s a neat little town. Arca, our hotel, is pretty close to the train station. When we checked in we were told we had an upgrade (noted as Upgrade! on the room key holder). We were given Room 16, which overlooks the Matterhorn, and has two rooms, two bathrooms, and a kitchenette. Entirely overkill for a one night stay, but otherwise very much appreciated.
The view around town is pretty spectacular. Lots of good views of the Matterhorn, lots of great little shops and a ton of restaurants. Like St. Moritz, it’s close to Italy and thus there’s a LOT of Italian flare tha comes out in the dining.
It’s hard to explain how great Zermatt was, so here are some photos from around town.
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The next morning was another travel day. But first we spent more time walking around Zermatt. We bought some snacks for the trip to Zurich, got a couple puzzles from the bookstore, and walked to some great spots to take pictures of the Matterhorn.
Apparently a lot of times it’s a little cloudy around the mountain, but this time it was nice and clear. The sun was shining on what was the left side of it, and it was just relaxing to be around.
After some relaxing, it was train time again, this time to Zurich. The first leg of that trip goes from Zermatt to Visp, and basically is a reverse portion of the Glacier Express trip we did past some really beautiful views. After a train swap in Visp it was on to Zurich, which sadly leaves the mountainy part of Switzerland and heads to the lower, greener lands.
The hotel was at Hotel St. Gotthard, which is literally a block away from the train station. We were upgraded to a pretty nice room, and immediately shot over to the National Museum, which is an absolute must. Unfortunately we only had an hour and a half there before it closed…when something closes at a time in Switzerland, THAT IS THE TIME IT CLOSES. So it closed at 5 and that’s when we had to be out.
But the museum is amazing. There’s all sorts of history in there, including information about all of the regions, a history of the country from Roman times onward, and just all sorts of stuff. The place is huge, and really needs a good few hours to walk through properly. My favorite thing was probably the one room of Christian history in there, where they had all sorts of carvings and things like that. There was a Christ on a Donkey carving from like 1,000 AD, which is insane.
Afterward we popped over to the train station for dinner. Seems like a weird place for dinner, right? Well the station has a whole mall below ground that has restaurants, shops, a couple small supermarkets and all sorts of stuff in there. It’s just super cool to me to see that much going on in the center of town with the trains and everything all around.
We grabbed dinner down at a little rice bowl place, then called it a day. The next morning was yet another great breakfast, then a trip to the train station, then the airport, and back home.
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I’ve been fortunate to cover a lot of cool events over the years, but bobsled and skeleton world championships at the home of the sport for two weeks was just the chance of a lifetime. And then, on top of all of that, just being able to sightsee and experience the region was something I’ll truly never forget. The food, the people, the sights, just everything was more than I ever could have hoped for. It was great being able to share the time with Lauren, who both had never been to Switzerland either, but also had never been to a bobsled race!
10/10, would absolutely travel there again.
Here’s an assortment of random photos. The full album of all of my scenic photos can be found here: CLICK HERE FOR PHOTOS
For my World Championships photos, click here: CLICK HERE FOR PHOTOS
Random photos:
