I met Patti in Zermatt April 11th,1982. This was a ten-day trip for me. Zermatt was a hard place to get to. For Patti's first Spring break at St Claire's school in Oxford, I sent her to Switzerland on a package deal that included a week’s stay with meals and skiing lessons every day. She knew nothing about skiing and what better place to learn than Zermatt, looking up at the Matterhorn. I sent her on the train on Saturday, April 3rd, a week before I left to pick her up.
I set out on Saturday morning, April 10th,
from the Birmingham train station. In
those days the train wasn't very direct.
I arrived in London's Euston station about 10:30 am after a lovely and
elegant breakfast on the train. I never
missed a chance to partake of that formal English breakfast service. Then I had to cab over to the International
connections train station. My train to
Dover left at 11:45. That one was a
horrible train. It was slow and the
accommodations were shabby. There was no
service, but it only took an hour and a half.
Next was getting on the ferry boat and keep in mind
that with each of these transfers, you must personally carry all your luggage
with you, up and down staircases, on and off vehicles. If you were lucky in those days, you caught a
"high-speed" ferry that crossed the channel in two hours. On this occasion, luck was not with me, and I
got on one of the four-hour versions. As
I recall, it rained the whole way - I just read a book.
Just like London or Chicago were central hubs and most
A-to-B trips go through the hub to make transfers, Paris was the hub for travel
in France. I got on a train at Dover
that took me to Paris. When I got in to
the Gare du Nord it was past midnight. I
took a cab over to the Gare d' Est, where my train
South took off at 1:15 am. It had been a
long day. I had taken a sleeping
compartment and I snored all the way to Basel the next morning. At Basel, I again switched trains to a local
that took me most of the way to Zermatt.
There were no cars allowed in Zermatt and the only way
in, was a little train that ferried people back and forth from Brig, along a
twenty-mile route. So I arrived in the
village about noon on Sunday. I had
never been there before, so I asked Patti to show me around. But, she didn't know anything about the
town! She'd gone out to the bunny slope
the first day she got there. and after two hours of lessons, she decided that
she didn't like skiing, so she never went back.
She had just stayed in her hotel room the entire week, reading War and
Peace.
When cocktail time came around that afternoon, I asked
her about the night life, and she said there was none. When I probed further, she admitted that she
hadn't actually gone out at night.
"Zermatt is famous for its après-ski clubs," I said.
We took a long walk all around the place in the
afternoon and we had a fondue and drinks at one place, then a schnitzel and
wine for dinner at another place. I
dragged her to three different night clubs, each filled with beautiful young
people her age and she said, "Gee, if I'd known these places were here,
I'd have gone out more."
The next morning. we retraced our steps with the two trains, arriving in Basel a little past one o'clock. We had lunch across the street from the Bahnhof and I found us a hotel for the night which turned out to be on the German side of town. We toured around Basel that Tuesday morning and then I rented a car. We took off about three and drove for two hours, which got us to the heart of the Schwartzenwald. We stopped at a health resort of sorts, at least it had a large indoor pool. We decided to try the pool out before dinner, and it was a great relaxer. We were the only ones in the pool. The exercise made us famished; then by seven o'clock, we both ate huge meals.
We arrived in Heidelberg Wednesday afternoon. I'd taken a detour to stop in at the
"little village" of Sindelfingen, where I had spent a week twenty-years
earlier on my college European Tour trying to get a job at IBM.
I had booked us into a small hotel right down town in
Heidelberg. We spent that night and the
next day sight-seeing around Heidelberg.
I showed Patti all the old places that Gisela and I had frequented. Gisela arrived Friday morning and we did a
little more sight-seeing. We had coffee
and pastries in that perfect little Patisserie along the main street of
Heidelberg. We ate dinner that night at
a Keller somewhere around the student area.
The next day, Saturday, we went down to Schonau,
This was Gisela’s childhood home, where she and her mother lived during the early years of the war. Gisela took Patti and I on a long walk up to the town's graveyard. We walked through this old house which now houses a driving school. Her grandmother and mother raised her her, in those early years. To Gisela, it is her childhood home.
We stayed there in Schonau Saturday night and then we took Gisela back to her parents' house in Mannheim on Sunday.
I turned the car in there in Mannheim and we visited for an hour or two with her parents.
Then Gisela walked us
to the train station and Patti and I began our trip, on a half-dozen trains,
back to England.
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