Our second weekend in Switzerland was going to be a busy one with multiple trains thru the Swiss Alps to the two iconic towns of Zermatt and St. Moritz!
With a 5:15 am alarm, we headed in to Zurich to catch our first train of the day to Visp where we caught a second train to Zermatt Switzerland! We were excited to see the countryside via train and just enjoy a nice train ride. As expected, we meandered our way through multiple villages set high in the Alps, each with their own character. Often, the tracks seemed to roll right thru the backyard’s of homes and then back into the mountains across deep gorges and along steep mountainsides and a few tunnels thru mountains!
The scenery was amazing with bright sunshine to highlight the tree covered mountains and blooming, spring flowers along the way. We also saw our second glacier of the trip on the way to Zermatt. While we took lots of pictures, they just can’t do the landscape justice. Maybe someday they’ll have a way to shoot 3D to give you a better feel for the scenery. At 11:30 am, our train rolled into Zermatt and our hotel (Schloss) was just about 100 yards from the station.
We checked our bags at the hotel and headed into the village of Zermatt to take in the sights and sounds. Zermatt does not allow auto’s on the streets so it was very pedestrian friendly. You did find several golf cards zipping around that the hotels used to fetch guests & luggage at the train station. We found a small cafe for a latte’ before continuing our exploration. Many of the shops were open even though it wasn’t ski season and the streets were bustling with people.
I’ll have to admit, I didn’t realize that Zermatt was a ski village sitting at the base of the famous Matterhorn! WOW, is all I can say to the views that we were treated to upon arrival of the stunning mountain top. Watching it all day, it created it’s own weather! One moment it sat in the sunshine and the next, it was cloaked in clouds and rain, only to change back to sunshine 30 minutes later!
As we’re walking Zermatt, we hear some bells ringing and look down the pathway to see these cattlemen bringing some bulls thru town! Not sure what the occasion was but it made for an interesting sight! And no, I didn’t see a pooper scooper following behind them to clean up!
Summertime in Zermatt is also construction time! With a short summer season, any construction has to get completed in a short time. Since Zermatt doesn’t allow auto’s in town, often times, the fastest way to get materials around is via helicopters! We had a couple of helicopters flying overhead all day shuttling construction materials back and forth across town.
The next day started with a 6:30 am wake up call as we had to catch a train to our next destination – St. Moritz! Now, this wasn’t just any train, this was the famous Glacier Express! This was an 8 hour train ride thru the towering Swiss Alps and views that overwhelmed our senses! We were treated to 1st class service aboard with lunch and libations! Now I’ll admit that I was pretty excited to spend the day on a train passing through the Swiss Alps to see sights we’ve never seen before.
What I came to also realize is that my level of excitement for this adventure probably peaked at about 4 hours into the trip! Don’t get me wrong, the scenery traveling thru the Alps was spectacular and something I’ll never forget but after about the 24 or 25th time of saying, oh look at that view, they were all very beautiful but they started to all look the same. Sorry, just being honest here!
The scenery to St. Moritz was just amazing with towering mountains, huge glaciers, tunnels and and several bridges, some towering hundreds of feet above a river. Each village that we went thru would be filled with small, family farms. You would see cattle grazing on the lush, green grass and people tending to their gardens.
After our 8 hour train ride thru the absolutely stunning Alps, we arrived in St. Moritz! Now, St. Moritz is like Aspen and Rodeo Drive rolled together and nestled next to a lake! It’s a ski resort town and unlike Zermatt, it is pretty sleepy in the summer time with most of the shops closed so we couldn’t go shopping for jewelry or a Bentley – haha! We trekked our luggage to the hotel, about a mile all up hill, and by this time, I’m getting a bit cranky after a long day on the train.
We freshen up quickly and head out to find some dinner only to find a couple of restaurants open and they were busy enough to have a 1 hour wait time. We continued our walk downhill and along the lake and ended up stumbling into an open restaurant called Veltlinerkeller, which is on the ground floor of a small hotel. They asked if we had reservation, which we did not and said we could eat, but had to be out by 8 pm – it was 6:30! Now, when we arrived, the place had 2 tables with people and couldn’t figure out why the rush to seat us, under the head of giant stuffed moose!
Well, by the time we finished, the place was packed and buzzing with people for dinner. The food was just amazing – Italian – and they had this grill/oven that was out in the middle of the restaurant where they would bring out the meat to cook and then serve at your table. It was obvious that this was a local’s hangout but we so enjoyed the food and atmosphere of this out of the way restaurant. We later learned that Veltlinerkeller is the longest, continuously run restaurant in St. Moritz and nearly impossible to get into during ski season – what a find!!
After dinner, we returned to our hotel exhausted but feeling quite full and thankful for the long walk back!
After a great nights sleep, we headed back to the train station to pick up the Bernina Express train to Tirano, Italy! It was “short”, 3 hour ride thru the Alps and we had the train car all to ourselves, literally! We stopped at the summit of Alp Grum for a photo op just below a glacier, which was spectacular to see in person.
Once in Tiano, we walked over to a small cafe’ for lunch and enjoyed truly Italian pizza! We were both hungry and devoured every last morsel before continuing our walk around town. It was a Sunday so town was very quiet but I did manage to find one, open Gelato shop and had to indulge – yuummm!
After our Gelato, it was back to the train station where we picked up a train that would take us to Chur, Switzerland where we then connected to another train back to Zurich to complete our weekend of adventure in the Swiss Alps!
That completes our weekend in the Swiss Alps! We thoroughly enjoyed exploring new towns in the Alps and seeing the beautiful sites via the Bernia & Glacier Express trains. It was truly a weekend to remember and I’d love to go back to Zermatt in the summer to do some hiking in the mountains… maybe on our next trip!
Now I’ll admit that after 10 days of up early, out late walking, exploring and eating, we were wore out! We took the next day off and it worked out as it rained off and on most of the day so we didn’t feel too guilty taking a break. I captured the video below looking down on the street light just below our window at the country house. If you turn the sound up, you might hear the rain drops gently falling and creating a wonderful sound to fall asleep to…
