Switzerland

In  1999 I went to Switzerland by way of renting a 6 passenger Fiat Diesel Motor Home in Europe and picking up my son who was then 25 and his friend who I think then was 23 or 24 who had just graduated from UCSC with a Bachelor Science in Physics then. So, I traveled from San Francisco to London to Edinburgh and spent a week in Scotland with my mother and 10 year old daughter in Edinburgh, Glascow and Aviemore mostly but rented a car in Edinburgh at the Airport and kept it through the whole rest of the trip with my mother who was 80 years old (about that then) and she lived to be 90 and I was with my 10 year old daughter who actually lives in Europe now with her husband all these years later.

So, after getting the motor home in Munich when we landed there we picked up my son and his friend who had been traveling all over Europe on a Eurail pass. They had been in Scotland about a month before staying in youth Hostels also. So, they had already seen most of England and Scotland before we arrived already.

We took the motor home to Oberamagau and then took a Gondola up the local mountain near there before we went first into Austria. We went into Innsbruck, Austria but I couldn't get my ATM Card to work there because I didn't have a chip in it but didn't know this was the problem yet in life.

Since then I have all my cards chipped because I had the same problem in South Korea when I didn't have chipped cards. So, without a chip often the most you can covert to the local currency from your non-chipped cards is about 100 dollars a day in converions to local currency so this can really put a crimp on your activities while traveling abroad.

Since I didn't want to use my American Express card in Austria beyond emergencies I decided to go to Switzerland because I felt that it wouldn't be a problem there and this was the case then. Not sure now because then it was 1999.

The biggest problem I ran into in Europe at that time was trying to phone my wife and baby daughter then in 1999 in California and navigating pay phones and calling cards without speaking German for me was sort of maddening and probably the most difficult thing I dealt with in Europe at that time. 

However, now you can Rent cell phones or buy throw away cell phones or get a special Chip for your cell phone if your cell phone will receive one which solves the problem nicely. However, it's important now if you want to save money to use an app like What's app or Signal or one of those when communicating back to the U.S. mainland from Europe now too.

Another service I used to use which allows you to put money into an account where you can literally call almost any phone number on earth for almost nothing is Skype.

Then we traveled from Austria into Switzerland where my ancestors on my father's side are from. They came over through England to the U.S. around 1725 to Philadelphia in a big ship up the river there. There were 6 brothers from near Zurich, Switzerland then in Philadelphia at that time. Since then my ancestors have spread all over the United States and likely the world at this point several hundred years later since it will be 300 years since they came here next year likely.

We stayed in a hotel in Zurich that time that had beams in the ceiling that were installed around 1400 AD which was interesting because you are not going to find anything like that in the U.S. (even though there are buildings still standing in Santa Fe, New Mexico from the early 1500s today, for example.

I found driving in Switzerland pretty exciting then in October of 1999 because rain and snow storms often were happening especially at higher altitudes on roads. And the biggest difference on roads there then was that there were or are NO Guardrails anywhere. So, if you screw up driving something often you are going to fall over the edge of that road 1000 to 5000 feet in altitude. 

There was one experience driving the stick shift Diesel Fiat 6 passenger motor home while snowing where I had to go past a big semi truck on a two lane road in the snow without chains on and I was really scared that I was going over the edge because of the snow and no guardrails. So, be prepared if it is still this way on Swiss Back roads with a lot of exposure without guardrails because it I guess can snow in September or October because it did at altitude in October of 1999.

The best thing then at least was driving a vehicle that I could downshift with instead of using my brakes. It's likely I wouldn't have survived that experience with brakes instead of being downshifted and I had my mother and older daughter with me then while I was driving this multi thousand foot drop with no guardrails to my right at night in the snow.