Switzerland

Switzerland

Mike Gray, Kyle Thiessen, Brandon Pentico, and I decided to plan a guy’s trip to Switzerland for our last open weekend of the semester. We went out on a limb to rent a car not knowing if it would go through because none of us had an international drivers license. It worked though! We skipped class Thursday, landed in Zurich around 8 A.M. in the morning and got our little minivan! We felt like we were the coolest people in Switzerland but I’m sure we looked pretty ridiculous four guys deep in a minivan. It is amazing how great it was to drive a car again though. I realized how much I missed the freedom to be able to travel anywhere I wanted. It was a great feeling to not have to purchase an expensive train ticket and go to a certain spot where you may not have wanted to go in the first place. Anyways we were on our way to the Swiss National Park and nothing was going to stop us (or at least we thought that). We took a route that brought us through Chur where the mountains soared above us. The drive was amazing, I want to compare it to Colorado but it was different. The towns that we drove through had much more history and the mountains were covered with snow. Some of the roads we took curved through the mountains and weaved in and out. Every turn you took there was a new beautiful view to look at. One point in the drive we were so high and the snow was so deep that we couldn’t even see over it. We made it all the way to Saint Moritz when we stopped to check out the town. This town hosted the 1942 Winter Olympics, so the town was full of very nice hotels that probably weren’t very full. It sat in a valley that occupied the entire hillside. While we were at this town we decided to turn around and skip Swiss National Park and head to find a hostel for the night. We made it to Thusis, Switzerland where we found a nice hotel for a decent price with great people. Everyone was so nice and everything was beautiful. We woke up the next morning and looked out the window to see the amazing mountains surrounding us. Our determination for the day was the Thermal Vals. Vals is a town located in central Switzerland that has a large fresh water bottling company. The owner of the company built five Hotels in the town to attract tourist to the beautiful area. In the middle of these five hotels (in order to draw more tourism) they built a Bathhouse. The baths were built in 1993 and house many different pools. There is a scent pool with flower pedals that has a rich aroma when you enter the space. Another pool is a hot tub that is 107 degrees. This pool sits right next to another pool that is 57 degrees. So obviously we would hop in the cold one and rush our way to the hot one to warm ourselves up. There was another pool that you entered from the interior and passed through a tunnel to reach the exterior where you looked out over the mountains that surrounded Vals. This pool was the perfect temperature even though it was cold outside you still felt comfortable in this pool. One last place worth mentioning in Thermal Vals was the steam rooms. We started in one steam room where it was so hot and had so much vapor you could barely see anything, but then if you moved past this room there were two more rooms that were progressively hotter and had more steam. This place was insane to be in but made you feel amazing when you were done. The entire place was so relaxing and beautiful I will never forget how amazing it was. We made our way to Lacern after Vals and found a random hostel to stay at. Out of our surprise Lacern was beautiful and had a lot of surprises itself. We walked around downtown for a while and noticed the city sat on a lake, which as you can imagine was beautiful at night. We woke up the next day (after an upsetting Iowa State loss) and headed to Mt. Pilatus where we had originally planned on riding the cable cars to the top. After finding out the price to do so was to much, we started to hike, which was just as amazing and got us some more great views. This country continued to hit me with more and more and was never ending cycle of beautiful views. After the hike we headed to Zurich where we had a little trouble to find a hotel but managed to do so. We spent Sunday lounging around Zurich off of the lake and reminiscing about the weekend and how amazing the experience was. I can’t express how blessed I am to see what I have seen so far this semester. I have been to the beaches of Spain, I have seen the mountains of Switzerland, I have seen the ruins of Italy. In all of these places I see Gods work, through the people, through the landscape, through the towns, I see it everywhere. I am so happy to be able to see what I am seeing and I will never forget all of these amazing experiences.