It has been a pretty quiet last few weeks. Most of my time has been spent finishing up my school work. I am officially 1/2 way through the Masters Program for CyberSecurity Risk Management. I have actually enjoyed most of the school work which is very surprising to me. Even more surprising is that I am maintaining a 3.95 GPA. For those of you that may have known me 30 years ago, I hope you have someone to help you up off of the floor after reading that! 🙂 I mean I did graduate college, but I graduated with a B- average. Nope, I was NOT a good student.
I did get one nice bike ride in before the rain has come. One my Tik Tok Friends talked me into a long ride last week. I knew I wouldn’t be able to finish the whole thing, but I was able to ride for about 80 miles before catching the train back home. We did ride through a beautiful part of Germany, and sometime soon I will be taking Julie through a drive in the Black Forest.
The first major climb wasn’t that bad. I was slow, but I got up the hill OK. The problem came in the second climb. It wasn’t that steep, but you can see it was pretty long. I made the mistake of letting my heart rate get up to about 160 and that was practically all I had left.
The last bit of the ride was great though. It was over 20 kms all downhill! I am really hoping to get stronger soon. Of it has rained every day this week, so I am getting a lot of miles in riding the basement. It just isn’t the same.
Julie and I have got our travel lists for the next few months together. We have some weekend trips planned here in Switzerland, and I just made reservations for what will be our longest drive, yet. We are going to drive to Vienna, Austria and then on to Budapest, Hungary. In addition some of our closest friends are coming for a week in July, and we are going to the Lauterbrunnen Valley here in Switzerland, then to Salzburg, Austria ending in Munich, Germany. This fall we also have another trip on the books for Munich. It will be our last chance for Octoberfest! Speaking of which we have to get busy on our outfits!!! I think we are going to try one last big trip late summer as well. We are thinking about a drive to Berlin, on to Rotterdam, and then back home. So I should have some good travel pictures to show you over the coming months.
Spring is finally coming, but it is coming slowly and as mentioned previously is very wet. However, last Saturday was a beautiful day so Julie and I decided to go see what was happening downtown.
Zurich is a very pretty city. We went for a stroll through the Old Town and along the river. We had lunch at our favorite restaurant, and then we finally went to visit the Police Station.
The Police Station is something I have wanted to see for a couple of years now. Most people don’t think of a police station as a tourist attraction, well sometimes Switzerland is a bit different! In the early 1900’s Zurich was experiencing a lot of growth; so they re-organized part of the Government offices. Including in the reorganization was closing down an orphanage and expanding the police station. After some more time Zurich decided to spruce up some of the government buildings; so they ran a contest for ideas on sprucing up some of the government offices. A man by the name of Augusto Giacometti won the contest, and he did fresco paintings on the vaulted ceilings in the entry hall of the police station. I think you will agree it does not look like your normal police station.
The entry hall is open to the public but only for a couple of hours each day. This time I was adamant that we were going to get inside. We learned that, as usual, the Swiss people are very clock conscious. We got there about 90 seconds early, and of course we were told to go back outside and wait for the right time! 🙂 I was very happy we finally got there to see the painting. It is magnificent.
The other bit of drama we had was that our ice machine broke down. Ice is something that people in the US take for granted. Here it is a bigger deal. We bought a counter top ice maker about three years ago. It is really nice having ice in our cocktails or water. 🙂 I had forgotten how expensive ice is here. A bag of ice costs 10 CHF. Of course since the bag won’t fit in the freezer, and I didn’t bring my really good cooler along, we wound up spending a large chunk of money for frozen water. At the rate we were buying ice, the new ice maker will be paid for in two weeks!
One update from our Eurowings debacle. Another week has gone by with no response. The gentleman that I ride with a lot gave me a website that will file a lawsuit against them for 30 Euros, and then they get 10% of the money. I have to decide if it is worth it, or not. I am leaning towards filing. I find it apalling that they won’t even respond.
I will talk to you soon.
