So it’s been a while since we last mentioned Europe. With all of the other things going on, we kind of took a break from blogging about it. If you didn’t read them or want to remind, here’s a list of the postings:
A Europreview
Day 1 : London or Bust (London)
Day 2 : Sight seeing & City Hiking (London)
Day 3 : Falling Down (London)
Day 4 : Motoring Day (London)
Days 5, 6, & 7: An attempt to accelerate this process (London, Cambridge, Paris, & Zurich)
Day 8 : Love at First Sight (Zurich, Chur)
And so that leaves us in Chur (here’s a map).
We woke up in the morning and headed down to catch the train to Arosa. First, however, we wanted to make sure we had some lunch. Because we were on a budget for food — due to the exchange rate as well as having just spent a premium of $150 on a hotel in Zurich a couple of nights before — we headed down to the local grocery store — Coop. I won’t get into the details, but apparently in grocery stores, you’re supposed to weigh & tag your own produce. They won’t do this at the register. Especially don’t do this if there’s only one cashier. Who doesn’t speak English. And who has to run back to the front of the store & do this for you. Causing the single line to get longer.
But I digress.
So we headed down to the train & got on with about sixty or seventy somewhat rowdy German senior citizens. Fortunately we found of the smallest second class sections and were unbothered by them so were able to enjoy the ride through the mountains.
The train stopped at about 4 or 5 little wonderful towns on the way up to Arosa. We didn’t stop as it didn’t look like there was much to do there, but they were enchanting nonetheless. We simply stared in awe and day dreamed about them from our train window.
Note some of the senior citizens departing the train on the car behind ours.
It had been 10 years since I was here last. The last time I was here was in June of 1999 for a choir trip. Now that I think about it, we also had a large contingency of senior citizens with us on our trip — as it was the intergenerational choir trip, with both high school students & senior citizens. Here’s a pic I shamelessly stole from one of my friends on Facebook who posted this.
Our first order of business was to eat, so we walked around the little lake and sat on the bench to have our lunch – which consisted of bagettes, wonderful cheese, grapes, and a couple bottles of water.
And of course, our second order of business was to try to run faster than 30km/h for the local speed sensors. And then plan our hike.
We kept on hiking up through Innerarosa and up to a beautiful chapel overlooking Innerarosa — complete with a majestic cemetery (I don’t use those words together very often).
We stopped to take a quick bathroom break while we had the opportunity (in the cleanest public bathrooms I’d ever seen) and refilled our water bottles and had a drink out of the free water “fountain”. Not sure what’s in the water but it was better than any bottled water I’ve had.
We met some other hikers who spoke enough English to take our picture
At this point, Katie had the high point of her trip. I kid you not. All the places she’d been & things she’d seen so far was nothing compared to what she saw & heard next.
Yep. Cows. (She would say “NOT just cows — COWS WITH BELLS!!!!”). They just wandered throughout the countryside and hills, and we could hear them long after we could make out any of their features of them.
Next was onward and upwards
And up, and up, …
And at this point we had come up far enough, and had to start the descent a different way back.
This is part of a 5-star hotel which, at the cheapest time of the year, if you reserve in bulk, starts at $325 a night (source).
The train home! Thanks Arosa! See you in another 10 years!
