Adventures in Deutschland: Day 24 - Switzerland (the Rhine Falls

On Wednesday, we had hoped to make it over to Strasbourg, France, but there were supposed to be thunderstorms in the afternoon (I never checked to see if they came), so we decided to head in the opposite direction and visit Switzerland instead. This trip included the added bonus of letting my dad and Jan see the train station where they were to have a 3 minute change-over on Friday morning on their way to Italy.

We spent most of the day scaling the Rhine Falls (see post from "Day 4" for more details about the falls). Schloss Laufen, the local castle, was still closed for repairs, but there was a lot more construction done than the last time I was there making us take a much wider path around the area. The climb to the footbridge wasn't nearly as bad as I had remembered. It was mostly downhill from the castle and relatively easy. Walking over the footbridge was extraordinary again. I wasn't sure how Jan would feel about it since she sometimes has trouble with heights, but she was just fine taking picture after picture. I had forgotten how loud the falls are and how aggressive the water below the bridge appears. The sheer power of the falls would make anyone pause.

After the footbridge, we took the walking path as opposed to the bike/handicapped path that I took on our last visit. Of course this wasn't planned; I just forgot that we might want a ramp to push the stroller down. The views from the walking path were even more striking. Of course, so was the amount of steps down... At the bottom of the falls we ate a great Swiss-German lunch of brats/franks and fries. I had the bright idea of taking a boat back across the Rhine at the bottom of the falls so we wouldn't have to make the arduous climb back over the falls. Therese greatly enjoyed this part of the day because, after trying out the big green slide at the park there, she got to feed the ducks (and swans and fish) while we waited for the boat. Of course when I thought about taking the boat over the bottom of the falls to save us some energy, I neglected to account for the seven or so staircases that you have to take to from the boat drop-off spot to the train platform at the top of the falls. Oops. Out of breath, we arrived at the train platform just in time to realize that we missed the train by 4 minutes, meaning we would have to wait for a half hour for the next train to come.

After our adventure at the Rhine Falls, we took a train back to Radolfzell. On the train we had our tickets checked (something that doesn't happen too often, but seems to happen in Switzerland more than in Germany) and we saw two police officers checking people's passports in a random fashion. I had never seen that before. They seemed to really interrogate a few of the people (especially the first one we saw, making me think at first that the police were there because this guy was in trouble). We weren't checked, but we were armed with our passports in case they had.

When we got to Radolfzell, we all went to Todd's school so my dad and Jan could use the internet to look up some information for their trip to Italy. We then went back to the Art Villa to snack on some wine and cheese before a nice dinner at Hotel Kreuz. My dad actually got a real beef steak - the first I've seen in my month here in Germany. We made a mental note to remember this place in case we really started itching for some beef. We topped off the night with a visit to Fernando's for some ice cream. It was delicious as usual. Therese is getting used to having her own scoop of ice cream (she favors chocolate), which has proven danger to her clothing. I guess that's the price you pay for happiness...