32 hours of traveling
December 31, 2012

Doha airportSo we are finally home.  We left at 9:19am yesterday from Grindelwald station (that was 10:19am SA time) and arrived home at 6:10pm.  The flight from Doha to Cape Town was pretty uneventful. We ate breakfast, slept, watched some movies, ate some more, landed in Johannesburg, waited for the change of crew and then flew to Cape Town.  The plane was pretty empty (our cabin was not more than 50% occupied) and at Johannesburg most people got off leaving only us and one other couple in the cabin.

It was a LONG travel home.  The extra few hours in Doha were the killer. If we had just had a short layover of a few hours then it would have been fine but the 7 hours there is what made it feel so long. However, I reminded everyone as we disembarked in CT that it was a substantial cost saving doing it this way to traveling on any other airline.  It was a really enjoyable an relaxing 10 days though. We did have some casualties along the way. I noticed yesterday (as I tried to put the passports in my back pocket of my jeans) that what I thought was my back pocket was actually a 7cm tear in my jeans. Nothing to do about that except wear my shirt out over for it for 32 hours. And more importantly, Michael had one big wipeout on the mountain while skiing. His neck hurt the neck morning but that seems to have recovered but he hasn’t stopped complaining though (about 3 days later) about his ribs. They are either bruised or cracked … guess we will have to take him to a doctor sometime this week to find out which.  It didn’t deter him from skiing though!

I promised some random thoughts on Switzerland and the trip (as I usually do) and so here they are:

  1. Switzerland is extremely expensive unless you are buying cheese
  2. If you want a cheap holiday, don’t go to Switzerland (or get someone else to pay for you)
  3. It is a really beautiful country – whether it is either winter or summer
  4. It is amazing that at 0 degrees C the number of people who sit outside and have lunch/dinner/coffee (we even did it once)
  5. Swiss chocolate is really good (and you should know that Swiss consume 90% of their chocolate themselves – only 10% is exported – just imagine how much they eat)
  6. If you want to learn to ski, do it when you are young
  7. Switzerland is a really expensive country to live in
  8. The train system works unbelievably well – don’t make the mistake of hiring a car if you’re visiting Switzerland – just use the trains (even though they are expensive)
  9. The Swiss know how to make good cheese and it is cheap relative to anywhere you might live
  10. Somebody needs to tell the Doharians that they need to build a tunnel under the runway so that the bus trip from the one side of the airfield to the other doesn’t take 15 minutes (we had to endure that again today)
  11. Switzerland is a very expensive country
  12. It is hot in the desert even in winter
  13. For being an expensive country the Swiss are rather unsophisticated when it comes to electricity and plumbing

I normally restrict myself to no more observations than days visiting a country but I think 13 is a good number to end on.  Did I mention that Switzerland is an expensive country to visit?  If not, I did now. Will we go back again … once the bank balance has recovered I reckon the answer is yes we will.  Any place that looks this beautiful is worth visiting again!

Grindelwald at night

 

One thought on “32 hours of traveling

  1. Welcome home, Temples. Thank you for sharing your entertaining commentaries again and attending to my food obsession. (Btw, Foul Medames is a bean dish but I expect you could see that! But I agree, the name is not very appetising. As Hallam said last Christmas when he saw ‘Turduckens’ in the supermarket, ‘Anything edible with the word turd in, deserves to go out of business!’ I noticed there were rather a lot left in Checkers freezer the other day! And a Happy New Year to you all.

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