Swiss Family Grass

The flight to Zurich passed quickly as we entertained ourselves with the onboard entertainment system. When I rose to stretch my legs I moved to the back of the cabin to ask a stewardess about the pets in hold in cargo. She assured me that Petey would be resting comfortably in a cabin with a steady temperature of 65 degrees. With my mind at ease, I returned to my seat and continued to pass the time listening to music and feeling excitement pulse through my veins.

We touched down at Zurich airport in a blanket of fog. The plane was at the gate in no time, and Andy and I deplaned and moved with the other passengers toward the shuttle that would take us to baggage claim. Within minutes, Petey was delivered to us through a small opening in the wall reserved for oversized baggage. He didn’t look any worse for the wear, and the man who handed his kennel to us mentioned that Petey was sleepy.

First stop after baggage claim was Immigration. Andy handed the immigration agent our passports and within seconds they were handed back to us unopened. We knew Customs would be the next stop, so we didn’t think twice about the fact that the agent didn’t bother to open our passports. We weaved through a short hallway and Andy saw the people picking us up through a glass barrier separating those in wait from the passengers clearing customs. Next we turned a corner and saw the exit door. We looked at eachother quizzically, shrugged our shoulders and headed for the door. It appeared the customs station was unmanned. We were nearly to the door when a man dressed in plain clothes said, “Whoa.” He came toward us, and for a moment I thought maybe he was going to ask us if we needed a cab. Instead, he said, “Where are you coming from.” I said, “Boston.” He said, “United States?” I answered yes. He then looked at Petey’s kennel and asked if he was our dog. We answered in the affirmative. He went on to ask one additional question. He asked if Petey has always been our dog. We said yes, and then he extended his hand and showed us the door to exit customs. That was it. No real stops, no questions about length of stay or reason for visit, or how much money we have, or even , “Did you vote for Bush or Kerry?” We were on our way.

A family friend and her sister greeted us with the traditional three cheek kiss at the door, and we were on our way. A couple of stops from the terminal to the garage for Petey to tinkle and we hit the highway bound for Uetliberg, about an hour outside of Zurich.

Heidi, our host, has a home high on the hill overlooking the valley, with a view of Lake Zurich. Her sister Ruth lives just two doors down. The views are stunning, and the green lush landscape of the valley becomes overshadowed by only one thing, the presence of the immense snow covered mountains. Heidi put us up in her home in posh digs. We have a beautiful room with private entrance and bath. She cooked traditional fine Swiss food for us the first night of our stay, and served a hearty breakfast the following morning.

Breakfast was followed by a hike that took us to the top of a hillside overlooking the next valley. The weather was warm and the clear blue skies allowed you to see for miles.

Later in the day we drove to a neighboring town to run errands and visit Heidi’s sister Ruth, hard at work in a travel office. Our first visit to a grocery store left me wide eyed. The Swiss run their grocery stores with precision. Not an item is out of place, and labels are arranged with exacting care. Each aisle left me with more and more questions. I would point at items and ask Andy or Heidi what the packages with indiscernible labels contained. The visit to the store was too short, so on the way out I tugged on Andy’s sleeve and said, “We have to come back again soon, when we have time to just walk the aisles and browse.” Heidi had already gotten us hooked on an exceptional tasting yogurt and a zesty horseradish cheese spread. Future visits to the store would prove fruitful, especially if we stuck to the itmes we’d had the fortune of sampling at Heidi’s.

The next few days brought sightseeing in a lakeside town call Raperswil and nights of good food. Heidi and Ruth served a wonderful fondue one night and an absolutely delicious bratwurst meal another. Heidi’s husband made the brawts, and they were yummy! Many of the foods we have dined on here are homemade, and time would be well spent watching how the two sisters cook. For example, Ruth made a pasta sauce this summer that we dined on one night. The red sauce was fresh and zesty, a true treat.

While we were thoroughly enjoying our visit with Heidi, the time came when we needed to check the status of the van. Andy telephoned the company and was told that the van would not arrive until Monday. According to the company rep, a strike in Antwerp was causing the delay. Heidi told us that we should take her car and recommended that we make a trip to Samedan to visit Andy’s Uncle. She made arrangements for a two night stay at a rooming house owned by her husband Jack’s cousin in Bever, handed us the keys to her car, and we were on our way to the mountain country. Her car is really cool, and I began to entertain thoughts of shipping one back to the states…

The drive to Samedan takes just shy of three hours, but the time passes quickly as you become mesmerized by the scenery. When we reached the highest point of the Julierpass, views of snow covered mountains stretched for miles and miles. As you begin your descent, Lake St. Moritz comes into view and the scene is idyllic. One can easily see why the rich and famous flock to this winter skiing haven. As we drove through town, the lake walkway was busy with walkers and picture takers.

Samedan is only a ten minute drive from St. Moritz. The picturesque city is quaint, with cobblestone streets and charming traditional Swiss houses. We arrived in early afternoon. We stopped at the Coop (one of the chain grocery stores) and picked up a baguette, horseradish cheese spread, smoked sliced beef, blood orange juice, and an apple tart for dessert. We walked to the town fountain and ate our lunch filled with the clean fresh air of Andy’s father’s hometown.

After lunch we visited Andy’s Uncle Fleury, who resides in an assisted living facility. He is 93, speaks five languages (including English) and has a wonderful sense of humor. During our stay we visited with him three times at the home’s café. He always ordered a mini bottle of wine for himself, and said that, “My doctor says it’s good for me.” Clearly he is doing something right.

On our second visit the three of us drove to the town cemetery, high upon a hill overlooking Samedan. Uncle Fleury walked us by each of the family graves and told us about those buried beneath, sometimes sharing family stories. At the edge of the cemetery we rested against a stone wall and Fleury pointed to the mountains, named them for us, and told us of childhood ski adventures.

After returning Fleury to the home, Andy and I finished the day with a respectable meal at a local hotel. We took a moonlit walk with the pooch and retreated to our guest house for a well needed nights rest.

We have been suffering from horrible jet lag for the past four days, staying up late into the night and rising in the afternoon one night, followed by early morning the next day. Our internal time-clocks are a mess.

On our last day in Samedan I walked with Petey from Bever to Samedan to meet Andy at the care home. Samedan and the surrounding villages are all linked by Wanderwegs (walkways). The system of trails is immaculately kept, with many resting benches along the way. They even supply bags for refuse and cans to dispose of dog waste and trash. You can take the trails high into the mountains, or stay grounded in the flatlands. Either way, you are sure to find a restaurant along the way, a nice place to stop for a cold drink to refresh your spirit. I vowed to return in the wintertime to snow shoe the walking paths and watch the bright winter sun cause the snow covered ground to glisten.

At the care home, we said our goodbye’s to Fleury and headed back to Heidi’s. She continues to feed us tasty local foods and I tell her that she should consider opening a bed and breakfast. We would gladly pay for her fine meals and lavish accommodations.

We spent our first day back in Uetliburg on a long hike with dog, cut short only by the fact that Petey rolled in an unidentifiable pile of dung. We returned to Heidi’s, hosed him down and sat in the warm sun to dry. Later Heidi returned with her mother, who lives in another town. We had tea and cookies in the garden, and I took stock of my surroundings and sighed a giant sigh of contentment.

Another call to the shipping company returned more bad news. The van is delayed another day. We are told it will arrive Thursday, and Heidi has told us to make ourselves at home and use her car to visit friends. So, tomorrow we will visit Dad’s friend Markus’s restaurant for Mexican food. Yes, Mexican food in Switzerland.

Shortly after Labor Day we hit the turnpike bound for the shores of New Jersey. Well, not really the shores. More like the shipyards. It’s time to drop off our van to the docks for delivery to Switzerland. Driving from Maine to New Jersey is just shy of 6 hours and we planned to move quickly, with as few stops as possible. The shock of gasoline prices has finally worn off, and now we are simply in search of a gas station where gasoline is priced as close to the three dollar mark as possible. A service stop off the turnpike yielded gas at $3.15 a gallon, a steal compared to the stations we’d passed earlier. At a previous stop I was able to take a snapshot as the gas station attendant was changing the price. When he noticed he was being photographed he was quick to tell me that this wasn’t the first, nor would it be the last time he would change the price this week.

With the van and Nicole’s car gassed up, we continued on the toll roads heading south. As Californian’s we are not accustomed to toll roads. By the time we reached New Jersey, our wallets were lighter and we were grateful for the true ‘freeways’ we have at home.

Finding the shipper’s drop off point proved challenging. The directions we had led us away from the waterfront, and into a town forgotten by business and industry. Each turn of a corner in Avenel, New Jersey moved us from boarded up buildings to streets lined with abandoned motels and dilapidated strip malls. The streets were dirty and the air thick with pollution. We were hoping to just make the drop and head right back to Maine. Oh, if only that was the way the day would go…

Instead, we turned into the culdesac that housed the shipper’s headquarters and were shocked to see a prison across the street, complete with prisoners working out in the yard and armed guards atop watchtowers. The shipyard turned out to be a small warehouse, where the van would be loaded into a container and then trucked to the freighter. When we approached the warehouse we were greeted by a motley crew, a group of four men who bore an uncanny resemblance to characters from a popular HBO series…take your pick, Sopranos or The Wire. They were gangster looking types who turned out to have the smarts of the three stooges, only there were four of them. They peered into our van, and walked around the vehicle looking at it with the eyes of men who have helped themselves to goods not their’s before. I was uneasy leaving the van with them, and by the look on Andy’s face, he wasn’t excited about handing the van over to them either. The lead idiot said to us, “All you need to do is leave me the keys, the car, and the title to the vehicle.” Yeah right, I’m going to hand over the vehicle that has been my home for the past two months to four thugs eyeballing it in a way that told me the second we left the warehouse the van would be mysteriously ‘lost in transit’. No way.

So, we told the crew that we were going to go get the van ready for travel, and we made a beeline for a telephone to contact the shipping office in New York. Claudia, the company representative we had been working with didn’t sound surprised when I voiced our concerns, and she said she knew how it appeared. But, she reassured me that the container service they use is reputable and that our one worldly possession was insured for the full value of the vehicle should something happen. It was at that point, sitting in a car in front of a state prison debating our options that Andy and I realized there really wasn’t much we could do. We had to put our faith in the journey. Either the van would make it to Swizterland intact, or it wouldn’t. From the time we dropped off the van until the time we pick it up in Basel, worrying wouldn’t help the process.

We decided to take the van to a carwash and thoroughly clean and pack the car for travel on the high seas. Little did we know that this task would prove so difficult. The first carwash we ventured to was filthy, kind of an oxymoron for a car wash. In addition, there were dead birds littering the carwash stalls. Next, we found a clean, well kept carwash where the cleaning nozzle actually contained REAL cleaning products. We set to washing the car, inside and out, and began to repack the vehicle when a man with a gun in a holster strapped to his side walked over to us and said that he was the owner. The man informed us that he had noticed we had been there awhile, and that we were in a bad neighborhood and would need to leave as soon as the night lights went on. He went on further to say that two recent homicides had occurred in the area. No further notice was needed. We packed our things and were on our way.

That night we stayed in a hotel in a town bordering the city where we were to drop off the van. At $185.00 per night, this city was definitely a step up from the digs we had seen in Avenel. The next morning we woke up bright and early, dropped the van off, and with nary a look back drove across the bridge into Manhattan.

Once in Manhattan, we stopped at the administrative offices of the shipping company, wrote a check for the passage of the van, and headed to one of my favorite New York deli’s for a pastrami sandwich and a Dr. Browns black cherry soda. Katz’s deli is an institution of sorts, and since it was Andy’s first time, I sent him in to pick up our lunch. I think he liked the look and feel of the eatery as much as I do. We ate in the car as we drove to northern New York to visit the grave of Andy’s namesake. All seemed to be going smoothly until we received a call from the shipper that our van did not fit into the 20 ft. container. Apparently the van could be driven into the container, but it’s size did not leave enough room to allowing for strapping the vehicle. It would cost another $745.00 to ship the van in a 40ft. container. We were at the mercy of the shipper, as we were now on a deadline, and so we agreed.

With that bad news in tow, we drove to Connecticut for a free two night stay at a Sheraton (a way to cut lodging costs for a few days), and then we drove to Cape Cod for a five night stay. Our Cape Cod hotel was located in Hyannis, about a two minute drive to the beach. We walked the town main street, visited the beaches, ate some semi-decent Thai food, and drove one day the length of Cape Cod to Provincetown.

We both enjoyed Provincetown quite a bit. The bustling main street is lined with interesting shops, and the laid back atmosphere and liberal townspeople were a welcome sight. I especially liked the Portuguese influence, which could be seen in the local food, portuguese malasadas and linguica and beans. Yum.

We also found a shop that specialized in Portuguese ceramics. The owners were from Portugal, and when I shared that my sister’s and I always wanted to open a shop like his, he remarked, “Not in Provincetown, right?” I guess he’s not too eager for the competition.

During our walk on Commercial Street, we stopped for a mango granita and admired the gelato at a shop owned by a local woman. Seeing the gelato made me long for Italy, and I grew exctied for our upcoming trip to Europe.

A view of the harbor at sunset, and the day was complete.

One interesting development that took place while in Cape Cod was our booking a place to stay during the winter. Andy had begun to worry that the van would become too cold to live in during the winter months, and began looking for housesitting jobs in Europe. He found a bed and breakfast in the south of France that needed caretakers for the winter. The owners travel to South Africa to run their other property in Cape Town during the winter and need someone to stay with their cats. We were able to secure the place for five months. We will be staying in a 16th century farmhouse with all the amenities of a fine bed and breakfast. There is room to sleep twelve, so we hope that many friends and family will come for a visit.

With a rather relaxing five days under our belt, we continued on to Boston. We spent four nights in Wakefield, a suburb of Boston. While in Hyannis we had telephoned Morton and Joan in Brookline and made arrangements to meet them for dinner. On Friday we met them at their home, a beautiful domicile draped in art and fine furnishings. They took us to a local Thai restaurant that had food with the most amazing flavors, Asian infused with American subtleties. Absolutely delicious. A welcome change from the camping fare we were now used to. Good food was followed by great conversation, as Morton and Joan shared many family stories. It was wonderful to spend time with family and feel so welcome, and at home. Morton and Joan made several walking tour recommendations, and we spent the next few days crisscrossing the city on foot with ease.

On Sunday we went to an A’s vs. Red Sox game. Oakland led the entire game, so you could hear a pin drop at Fenway. The fans were none to pleased with the outcome of the game. Overall, the fans were friendly. I was wearing Andy’s A’s jersey, as he didn’t have the nerve. Once seated in the bleachers, a fan tapped me on the shoulder and promised not to spill “too much beer” on my jersey. We all had a good laugh. The most stunning of all developments at Fenway was the fact that the young man seated next to us was from San Jose. He went to Bellarmine and now attends UC Berkeley. We both chuckled at the irony of being seated next to eachother so far from home. It was a great way to spend the day at the ballpark, watching America’s favorite pastime.

One final note about the game…as we left the park and walked back to the car we encountered a half dozen fans wearing A’s insignia gear at the player’s gate. As we approached, one of the fans pointed to my jersey and said, “There’s another one!” I responded with “Oaktown in the house!” All the fans fell silent and stared at me curiously. I guess they weren’t true hometown A’s fans. Who doesn’t know the A’s are from Oaktown?

Monday morning put us back on the road, and we drove to Old Orchard to find a pet friendly, cheap motel on the beach for the remaining two weeks before our flight to Switzerland. We were lucky to find a hotel located “on the beach”, where the owners were eager to make us a deal for the two week stay. We booked the room, which came with a kitchenette to ease the strain eating out has on the pocketbook. From day one, I fell in love with Old Orchard. As this is the quiet season, tourists are gone and you can walk the beach for miles and only pass a handful of people.

So, that’s what I did. I spent the days walking Petey on the beach, and he spent the days playing with the many dogs that roamed the shoreline. It was great for both of us. Exercise and socializing combined. Perfect! Well, almost perfect. About two days before Petey was to go to a veterinarian in Portland to get a ‘clean bill of health’ certificate for entry to Switzerland, he go into quite a tussle with a very large German Sheperd. He ran to the sheperd on the beach and went straight for it’s neck. After a few minutes of circling the leashed sheperd, the dog grew tired of Petey’s persistence and grabbed him by his neck and began shaking him like a dog toy. Andy and I tried without success to free Petey from the other dog’s clutches. When all was said and done, it looked as if Petey had come away from the skirmish unscathed. But, when we got back to the motel, we noticed a bloody puncture wound on Petey’s neck. We waited to see if it would stop bleeding (as we were concerned if we went to the vet, he would not pass the health exam needed for travel). The wound seemed to scab over, so we decided to skip the vet that day, and wait for his appointment scheduled for Friday.

Every other day we would head into Portland to visit with Nicole. She continued to show us the sights of Portland and we made two road trips. First, we went to Freeport to stock up on long john’s (per Morton’s suggestion). Then, the following week we drove to Auburn to visit with Aunt June and Adele Silverman.

Also during our stay, one of Nicole’s friends cooked a full Tex-Mex meal for us, complete with Chile Rellenos. Between days by the sea and sightseeing with Nicole, the time passed quickly. After running some last minute errands, including stocking up on toiletries and goods for the pooch, a visit to the veterinarian for a health certificate, and stopping to pick up some new clothes, it was time to say goodbye. Nicole took us out for a lovely dinner, and then the next night she came to Old Orchard one last time. We walked the beach together and spoke of how the time had passed so quickly. The sun set, and she was off for home.

The next morning we awoke early to drive to Sutton, Massachusetts to get Petey’s health certificate endorsed by the USDA (what a racket that is!). One office claims you need two signatures, while another tells you that you don’t even need a health certificate. We decided to play it safe and pay for BOTH signatures. Then, we went to a hotel near the airport in Boston to rest up for the flight. Oh, and if only we could have rested. But, instead we spent the better part of the afternoon giving Petey a flea bath to get rid of the infestation he received at the “pet friendly” motel. Then to make matters worse, the flea treatment appeared to loosen the scabbing on the puncture wound, thereby leaving a gaping, bleeding hole on Petey’s neck. So, we were off to the vet again. We were lucky to find a vet in town who called Petey’s condition an ‘accident’ instead of a bite, so he could still travel. She irrigated his wound, prescribed antibiotics, and gave us a sterile solution IV bag and needle so that we could irrigate the wound for the next three days. It was an absolutely nervewracking ordeal, and I was glad when we were able to get Petey’s wound camoflauged and ‘customs inspection’ ready. Next, we were back to the hotel to quickly pack and leave for the airport.

At the airport, I gave Petey a last walk before placing him in his kennel, went with him to be inspected by the Transportation Authority, and then handed him over to the airline (the whole time praying to the big guy above that everything would go smoothly). Then, Andy and I cleared the security checkpoints and made it the to gate in time to watch Petey’s kennel be carried onto a conveyor belt on the tarmac and loaded onto the plane. It was with great relief and a huge smile that I witnessed his loading onto our plane. With that weight lifted off my shoulders, I had now only to worry of his fear during the flight. Shortly thereafter we boarded the plane and were bound for Switzerland, the mystery of what lies ahead merely a buzz in my ear.