Our trip to Zurich was… interesting. I definitely learned quite a few valuable lessons, which I will share with you.
1. Make SURE to double check the costs of the hotel before you book it. I looked all over online for decent prices for a hotel. I found the Crowne Plaza on one of the sites for around $270 for both nights. I decided to look on the hotels actual website instead of going through booking.com. (Side note: Switzerland uses the Swiss franc for it’s currency, which is abbreviated CHF.) Apparently I got the conversions of the currency all confused or something.. I’m not sure what exactly happened besides my stupidity coming to the forefront. The hotel ended up costs 265CHF per night and conveniently the conversion rate between CHF and USD right now is 1 to 1… So our hotel bill for both nights was $540. Oops. BIG oops.
2. Switzerland is very expensive. Even excluding the outrageous cost of the hotel, Switzerland is really expensive. Beautiful, but expensive. We didn’t buy any souvenirs or even postcards because the postcards were $1.20 each. A coke was $3.50 at the cheapest and usually $5. We ate at a take out Chinese place and our bill was over $45…
3. Make sure you know what’s going on in a town before you visit it. We really wanted to see the “allstadt” (Old Town) part of Zurich, and we did, kinda. It was just with 50,000 other people… There was some HUGE festival going on in downtown Zurich. There were thousands of people everywhere, so you couldn’t really take in the beauty of the city with all the people and rides and vendors everywhere. It really took away from the quaintness of Switzerland, and fighting the crowds is not my idea of fun.
4. Sharing a hotel room with a 13 month old that doesn’t sleep well is not my idea of fun. Abbie does fairly well traveling, but we made the mistake of keeping her out late on Saturday night. We were out until 10:30pm, at which point she was completely overly-tired and on her 2nd wind. She SCREAMED when we tried to put her to bed, and if she does that at home, you can leave her alone for 5 mins max and she’s out. However, when she knows you’re in the room, she’ll scream for a LONG time. I think we finally got her to sleep around 12:15am, and she was up at 6:45am. Nice.
5. I’m married to a saint. Despite my stupid mistakes of booking an expensive hotel and picking a place to come that had a festival going on, Mark never once said anything to me about it, besides it’s a good thing this month his pay is tax-free, and he laughed when he said it. Seriously, that man is amazing. He didn’t get mad about any of it, and just chalked it up as lessons learned. I don’t know what I ever did to deserve him.
Anyway, we stopped by Lake Como in Italy before we went into Switzerland to grab lunch and get gas. We were only here for an hour, but it was BEAUTIFUL. Here are a few pictures.
The drive through the mountains in Switzerland was beautiful and these pictures don’t do it any justice, but I’ll share them anyway. 
Here’s what their money looks like!
The train station in Zurich.
One of the churches in Zurich, but I don’t remember which one.
So Abbie didn’t want to take a nap on Sunday either, after her HORRIBLE night of sleep on Saturday night. We went back to the hotel with hopes of getting her to take a nap, and after an hour of trying we finally gave up and stuck her in the Ergo and headed out again. Not more than 5 mins into the walk and she was out cold, and stayed asleep for over an hour.
Despite the lessons we learned on our trip to Zurich, we still had a good time, and I’m happy as long as I’m with Mark.
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