How We Maximized 50 Hours

There’s a delicate line to be found between “over-scheduled” and “maximized opportunity,” and I’m the queen of erring on the less desirable side of the two. It never fails that when I start planning a trip, I find far too many “once in a life-time” or “not to be missed” opportunities in one too many destinations to squeeze into a single trip, but how do you decide what to skip?!

Planning with Purpose

Whether you intentionally plan trips with a “purpose” or not, everyone does. For some, the purpose is simply to fulfill a vision of sleeping in, discovering what’s in a city as you walk past it, or to simply get a tan. There’s nothing wrong with simple plans like the above, and in fact, it makes it easier to demonstrate the following construct of purpose driven trip planning.

Example. If your goal for a trip is to simply wear sandals and get a tan on the beach, then some things to consider with this goal in mind, might be the following:

What’s the weather like at the time of year that you’re considering a visit to this destination?
How much time do you need to take to accomplish your tan?
If you’re traveling with a partner or friend, are your goals for the trip perfectly in sync, or does one of you desire to take a day to go shopping or take a tour, or both?

The moral of the story, is that trip activities can quickly runaway with you and at the end of it, you might leave without having felt like you got the tan that you wanted.

Our Purpose for Switzerland

Like many, my husband was unable to celebrate a milestone during the COVID-19 Pandemic in the way he would have wished. In this case, his 40th birthday had always been a birthday that we intended to celebrate abroad, but international travel in January of 2021, was not in the cards. However, things had improved by December of 2021 and we decided to take our chances and brave a trip to Europe.

What I’ve seen of Europe has all been amazing which can make it difficult to choose a single destination out of the many diverse locations available. However, I thought that this trip might be better spent focusing on things relevant to my husband, and in this vein, I thought it the perfect opportunity for a mini pilgrimage. A few years prior, he had inherited a wristwatch from his grandfather after his passing. The watch no longer worked, but was a luxury timepiece which his grandfather had himself purchased in Switzerland in the early 1970’s. Ding, ding, ding… light-bulb moment!

I contacted the manufacturing headquarters of the watch brand (located in Switzerland) and asked if we would be allowed to physically deliver the watch back to them for repair, rather than simply taking it to a local jeweler/dealer and having them ship it to Switzerland on our behalf. Fortunately, they said yes, and that they would ship it back to us when the work was completed.

With the central activity of our trip established, the rest of our adventure could unfold much more easily now knowing what we needed to work around. Ultimately, we decided to limit our time in Switzerland, and to focus solely on the delivery of the watch to the factory, then we would border hop to Austria in time for New Years Eve in Salzburg. The way this worked out was thus:

Depart USA December 28th
Arrive in Zurich Switzerland (approximately 9 AM) December 29th
Take a 2 hour - Old Town Zurich, cultural walking tour, starting at 2 PM December 29th
Depart via train to Biel/Bien Switzerland, 10 AM December 30th (location of the manufacture)
Deliver the watch to the factory
Return via train to Zurich, 3 PM December 30th
Depart via train to Salzburg Austria 11 AM, December 31st

If you do the math, we spent VERY little time in Zurich, but it was long enough to make the following observations:

Zurich is beautiful - Super clean, beautiful buildings, lots of greenery despite being very urban and cosmopolitan… hell, even the people are pretty!
Zurich is extremely expensive! I expected it to be high, but my expectation of high cost was wrong by about half. Our first evening there, we ate dinner at a vegetarian salad-bar and drank hot tea with our self-served meals, and it cost roughly $75 for the two of us. You’ve been warned.
It’s hard for me to know what the impact of COVID-19 may have had on the operational hours of the retail industry at the time we were there, but everything that wasn’t a restaurant or bar, would close by 6 pm, which made for an extremely harrowing experience trying to purchase a box of Swiss chocolates for my mother in-law before we left. Had I known that the hours would have been so limited, I would have arranged my shopping time differently in our schedule.

In summary, I probably wouldn’t go back to Zurich outside of just using the airport, it was just too expensive for me to enjoy. However, knowing what the prices in areas outside of the city are like, and knowing how beautiful the country is, I would 100% go see more of Switzerland.