My dear late Dad always wanted to do a train holiday in Switzerland but unfortunately when he finally got one organised he had a DVT and was unable to fly so it got cancelled. When he died, Ian and I decided to do one in his memory and now, 9 years later, we've finally got round to it, Rather than do an organised group holiday we thought it might be fun just to roam around on our own. I got return flights to Zurich for £2 each with our BA Avios points and left Ian to do all the other planning and what a superb job he made of it. This is our itinerary:
1 night Lucerne
2 nights Interlaken
1 night Montreux
2 nights Zermatt (we're not stopping in Bern but the train back to Zurich goes that way)
It was our last opportunity to use the BA First Lounge as Ian's Gold status reverts to Silver at the end of the month and having left home at silly o'clock we thought we'd have a quick shower before breakfast. When we eventually found the showers, which were nowhere near the loos and nowhere obvious, we were told we should have booked. But instead of saying "don't worry, we're not busy but just so you know for next time " the women at the reception gave us a complete lecture on how things had changed since COVID etc so as it was now 05:30 and we had less than an hour before boarding, we simply told her to forget it and walked away. I presume she thought we were going to complain about her as she followed us all the way back to our seats saying that she wanted to explain. I've since searched BA's website and can find nothing about having to book but we will indeed know for next time (if they have them in the other lounges).
The flight was nothing special but we enjoyed our extra legroom seats and having only hand luggage we were soon on our way to the train station, ready to sample Switzerland's famous timekeeping and efficiency.
There was a long queue in the ticket office so we were recommended to use the self-service machines outside to buy our ticket to Lucerne and that there were people around to help out if needed. Unfortunately our helper managed to buy us 4 tickets; two at the standard price and two discounted ones (we had already bought a half price card which is valid on all normal trains plus a couple of excursion routes), but apparently she had "done her best" After waiting around to get the refund sorted we missed our planned train but headed down for the next train only to find it was running late! So much for Swiss efficiency"
For most of this trip I'll be shooting through train windows so I'll apologise in advance that the quality of pictures will range from poor to dreadful as no doubt different degrees of cleanliness will occur.
I was delighted to see double-decker trains as we've only seen them once before, in Italy.
The Tourist Information was on the station concourse and she gave us directions to the hotel plus details of times for a boat trip on the lake. Our hotel had already emailed me our Lucerne City Passes which gave us free travel on buses and trams so we plan on using these as much as possible to save Ian's energy.