Glacier Express - St. Moritz

Day One of our Glacier Express experience took us from Geneva to St. Moritz (through many intermediate stops...)

I should probably mention first that we bought the entire trip package from a wonderful tour company, Zermatt Rail Travel. The package included all rail passes from our home station to St. Moritz where the Glacier Express picks up, then the pass for the actual Glacier Express and finally from the final station in Zermatt to our home in Geneva. The package also included our hotel accommodation in St. Moritz and Zermatt as well as meals at each hotel and onboard the panoramic train. The tour operators were super accommodating, helped us figure everything out, made sure we had a baby bed in each of our hotels, and helped us book an extra seat (for literally pennies) for Katherine on the train. If anyone is ever in Switzerland and wants to take this trip, I would highly recommend using ZRT.

Ok back to the story. We got up pretty early on Thursday morning, fed Katherine, and headed to the train station. First problem there: it turned out that there was some damage on the line which we were supposed to take out of the city and our train was cancelled. Ok no big deal. We chose to go on a very early train to allow for plenty of time for transfers and then some sightseeing in St. Moritz. We switched our tickets and waited for the next train. Well, that one got cancelled as well. The line was still getting worked on. I started panicking a little. Finally we figured out that we could hop on a train going in a slightly different direction and then connect through a different town so that's what we did.

That forst part of our trip was not super pleasant. We were crammed on a crowded regional train with a bunch of other people whose connections were also cancelled. Luckily it went by pretty fast and by early afternoon we were in beautiful St. Moritz. Once again, this is how awesome ZRT is at organizing these tours. Our hotel was super close to the train station and it also overlooked the main open square in town. We got a very nice spacious room and we even met the owner of the hotel who talked to us about about our plans and helped get us situated with all of our stuff and stroller and such.

After getting settled in our room we decided to go out and explore the area a bit.

St. Moritz is a very posh little town, famous for high end shopping and first class ski resorts. The most famous mountain, which is also right in town is called Piz Nair. In the summer, the ski areas are turned into awesome hiking trails and the same cog wheel trains which in the winter take skiers up the mountain, also run in the summer but with hikers and other tourists.

We put Katherine in the Baby Bjorn and headed up to admire the views. It was truly amazing. Here are some pics. Really cool views of the city below, aweseom mountains and glaciers all around... Gorgeous. We hiked around there for a bit and took some cool photos. Katherine slept most of the time. Now in retrospect I have to admit that traveling with a small baby (she was 4.5 months then) really is a lot easier...

 Fyi 3000 meters is like 9000 feet, so it was pretty high!

After coming back down, we explored the town a bit, had some ice cream and bought some souvenires. Then we headed back to the hotel. We were hoping to feed Katherine and put her to sleep and then come down to the hotel restaurant to have dinner but she wasn't having any of it so we brought her with us in the stroller. After a few minutes she proceeded to go to sleep in it and slept through the entire time we ate so it worked out great. And then we went to bed pretty early as we knew we had an early start the next day.

More to come.