Holiday 2025 - Zurich | Paulʼs blog

Blog ≫ 2025 ≫ Holiday 2025 - Zurich

Thu Sep 4

After a brief stop in Munich, then on to our late train, our new reserved seats, and onward to Zurich. One other small hiccup, we would be arriving in Zurich after the hotel reception closed, but we called the hotel to explain and they have an escape room style combination key release outside the hotel for such an eventuality.

We arrived at Zurich, tired, but fine. Wife and T2 went in McDonalds for tea. This was our first taste of how expensive Zurich is, good grief. T1 and I obviously better than eating in a mcdonalds. At least he is when he's with me, if I wasn't there he'd have dived right in.

Our hotel was small, our room was small. There was no aircon, just a small moving fan. It would have been a nice hotel for one person or a couple, nice for travelling business people. Not ideal for a family. Wife thought about us moving, looked into it the next day. The hotel said they would refund us the other days, and we could have got something else just a bit further out, but in the end we couldn't be bothered.

The breakfast was continental only. The bread was nice though.

We walked around Zurich, eventually heading back to the station and got a train to somewhere we could get a cable car for a bit of a view. The train was expensive, so the cable car didn't really seem it. Maybe we messed up and could have got a full day travelcard for these sort of things. At the top of the cable car we could have gone on a bit of a hike, or sat in the cafe bar. Guess which one we did? The cafe bar was expensive, we were getting a bit numb to it by now. The view was nice. We came back down again. We did find they don't do a lot of ticket checking there, so we actually didn't have a ticket for the train back again.

We walked around Zurich again, it's quite nice. There are trams and a lake. We rode the trams and swam in the lake. Not just swimming in the free bit of the lake though, oh no, we paid to go in a roped off bit of the lake. We had a good time there, there were diving boards and a water slide, and sunbathing areas and a cafe. This sort of lido culture is quite big here. We had actually walked all the way to the lido, though we knew we didn't have our trunks with us. The plan was find it, settle there, then I run back to hotel and fetch everytthing. T1 came with me, we got the tram there and back. We're becoming experts in Swiss public transport now and knowing just went to think "I'm sure that ticket I bought earlier still covers me for this leg too doesn't it..?". We had a nice rest of the day there at the lido. The boys and I did actual swimming out to some floating platforms, and went on the diving boards. Wife is not such an excellent diver as me so did not...

We should not have booked four days in Zurich, and we knew this right after we did it. We just found it difficult to move our other dates to do anything about it. Zurich is nice to look at, but only for about a day.

I have more to fit in here, we have some pubs and restaurants to put in here, and some photos. I just wrote up these thoughts while on the train back from work last night. I still have the original Vienna write up to complete, I know I left that one hanging ¹.

Of course I've lost the impetus to write up more about Zurich now. After the cable car we got a double decker train back! I think this was my first double-decker train. Then we found a bar that we liked, called Bierlab. They brewed their own beer and they had a games console to play on. T2 loved it. I loved the beer and the cider, after my first nearly-pint I got a flight, that was good. We would come back to this bar again. We went to a fairly terrible big Irish pub for dinner, it was showing football. The next day we did the swimming. We wanted to go back to Bierlab again the next day but it was closed so we searched for another pub with games and found a place with good beer and two pinball tables, one Iron Maiden and one X-Men. Then to Lou's diner for dinner, an expensive dinner, but good. I feel I must have written this up already. I had a cocktail. I did go for a run in Zurich, did a 5k that has gone completely unremarked upon, that was nice, I saw other people swimming. Really funny to see some people walking to work and others walking the other way in swimwear. Next a boat trip that as good, to the Lindt chocolate factory that was not good. The others like the "free" chocolate. On our last night we went to Hitle, the oldest vegetarian restaurant in the world they say, you bought your food by weight and we were all a bit cautious about taking too much, so I didn't take enough. I didn't like it, I would have liked it more if it wasn't so dear though. I didn't love Zurich can you tell?

5k: Five km, just over three miles in old money.

⬅️ Holiday 2025 - Munich (bonus stop) :: Tightly scheduled Wednesday ➡️