Zurich, Switzerland

Posted by Dad on Aug 19, 2005 in Travel | 0 comments

This Saturday night I’ll be traveling to Zurich, Switzerland. On Monday I’m attending a training session for work. My flight takes me to London’s Heathrow airport where I need to switch over to a British Airways flight to Zurich. Total trip time is around 14 hours. Gees!

Being a family man first and foremost, it pains me to have to leave on a Saturday and miss Sunday with my wife and kids. However, my only alternative is to fly Swiss directly to Zurich. As I’ve not flown Swiss before, I did some research on the airlines. It turns out that Swiss is the current incarnation of SwissAir, the venerable Swiss airline that went bankrupt in 2002 and had an “accident” in 1998.

Digging deeper into the available passenger reviews on various sites, I began reading that they only recently began serving decent meals on their flights, that they were offering video without audio and that the service was very “German” (no offence to my German brothers out there). All of this made me look for alternative carriers. The flight on Saturday turned out to be the best alternative even though I need to basically leave a day earlier.

The troubles getting there notwithstanding, I’m actually looking forward to it. It is my first time to Switzerland. I’ve heard Zurich is a beautiful city and a great place to take pictures of old world structures. I’m taking my old Canon PowerShot S100 and will post the images in the gallery if I take any good shots.

I tried to convince my wife to go along with me. Heck, the hotel is paid for and we could have made it a short vacation. However, the airfare turned out to be very expensive. Besides, I don’t think she wanted to leave the kids alone either. Also, in this world of terrorist attacks, a parent needs to think twice about traveling together in the same airplane. That’s a shame.

The plan is to be back on Wednesday, tired and jet lagged. God willing, it will be a nice adventure.