Jaguar wrote:[
I will be closer to Lucerne, southern side of Lake Lucerne, about three hours from Zermatt (half way across Switzerland!) May try to make it over if we have time. I try to avoid the touristy areas, but since much of the natural beauty is often the most touristy areas it makes it difficult to skip. Thanks for the tip.
It's funny, the whole country is less than two times the size of the DFW Metroplex, it boggles my mind. You can fit over 16 Switzerlands into one Texas. Zurich to Paris is less than half the distance of El Paso to Houston. The scale of Europe is completely different than here.
Money will be an issue, still have a kid in college so that takes most of my spending money. The flight, hotel, meals, and transportation are all paid, so that's a start...
Switzerland has a 0.7 homicide rate, ranking it 17th safest in the world compared to USA rate at 4.7. Of course collection data will vary from country to country, but I really don't expect any problems. Being unarmed means being in condition "bright yellow" for me anyway.
I had the chance to visit Lucerne, arriving via rail from Milan. The train trip was breathtakingly beautiful as was the rack railway trip from the lake to the top of Mount Plautus. The cable car ride down was terrifying for someone with a fear of heights.
Switzerland was a sharp contrast with Italy, much of which was a military armed camp. There were machine gun emplacements in Rome and Caribinieri with machine pistols everywhere . Much of Italy was taken over by lawless immigrants who would, among other things, throw mud on your windshield at a traffic signal and then demand payment to clean it off. Italian homes and apartments have front doors with complex locking mechanisms like bank vaults. Switzerland did not have any of those sorts of issues then.
Without a language of their own, the Swiss adapt a primary one from their closest neighbor and Lucerne used German or at least their form of that language. They haven't adapted the crime problems of either France or Italy with those languages.
