We arrived in Zurich and met up with Margaret and Chris smoothly, despite our worries about recent delayed flights (especially out of Newark which was their departure point). Found the waiting van pick up and headed off to Baden. We had initially planned to begin our trip in Basel, the embarkation point for our Viking Cruise, but discovered that the entire town was taken over by the annual Eurovision festival. Thanks to Katherine Belsey for the suggestion to spend the first couple of nights in Baden as an alternative. A small town with just enough sights to occupy us for a couple of days and known as a place to “take the waters” at the hot springs fed baths since the days of the Roman occupation here.
After a nap at the very nice Ramada by Wyndham Hotel du Parc, we decided to head into the historic part of town. I got out my phone to call an Uber and on the advice of the receptionist, we headed toward the Bahnhoff (train station - or so we thought). The price was 52 Swiss Francs which seemed very expensive for a 5 minute drive, but we had already noted that prices in Switzerland were steep so we accepted it (possibly in part due to jet lagged brain fog). We were picked up by a very friendly driver named Milena who said she was from Spain. Her English seemed good, but I was curious that her GPS instructions were in Russian. “ Oh yes” she said, “I speak Russian also, though my German is still not so good”. No problem for us obviously. We headed off in the general direction of the town. Chris observed that we’d been driving for longer than 7 minutes, but we thought perhaps cars have to make a wider circle to get back into the center. After about 10 minutes though, we were getting on the main highway and soon it became clear that we were headed in the direction of Zurich rather than Baden. I tried to ask her more about where we were headed, but I wasn’t connecting in English so I switched into Spanish and discovered that somehow I’d chosen the wrong Bahnhof on the App drop down and she was indeed taking us back to the one in Zurich. Thank God we had a Spanish speaking driver because if her primary language had been German, we probably would have been all the way to Zurich before we got it straightened out, But my 3+ years of Duolingo Spanish paid off and I was able to ask her to get off the highway and she was able to explain to me how to cancel the ride and start a new one back to Baden. Lesson learned - be very careful about the drop down menu. On the way back, Milena was curious to know why anyone would vacation in Switzerland when they could go to warmer, cheaper Spain with beaches. She just couldn’t understand the appeal of the Rhine cruise.
After we concluded our “Aventura” as we decided to call it on the return trip, she left us in Baden where we were able to do a little shopping and find some dinner at an outside restaurant in a pedestrian street downtown. And the whole trip cost a little more than half of the original price we thought we’d have to pay. Our waitress turned out to be a Kurdish Turk at a restaurant serving pizza and kebobs. So it was a very international evening. No food pictures because we forgot to take them, but here’s a shot of the little square nearby. We’re tiny in the right foreground because I couldn’t bear to crop out the fabulous sky, By then, we’d had sufficient “aventura” for one day and headed back (more directly) to the hotel for some much needed sleep
