Ah, Europe: France to Shop, Germany for Lunch, Switzerland for Dinner!

This is part three of my Swiss Sampler.

We took the train from Davos to Basel.  Pine trees surround the track , giving glimpses of the sunlit mountains and the cross country  and downhill ski trails. I had all I could do from breaking the window and jumping out to ski.  Ski rental shops can be found at every train station and each town has a lift.

Our friends Gus and Maurice moved to Basel nearly two years ago.   At this point, they’re debating whether they’ll ever want to return to the US.  They’ve learned German (already fluent in French); they enjoy hopping on trains and planes to travel everywhere; they have had lots of visitors and generally life is very good.  Switzerland is expensive; they post their mail in Germany (half the price) and food shop in France.

Basel, Switzerland’s third largest city with about 170,000 residents sits where the Swiss, German and French borders meet. There’s lots of crossing between the borders for work and play; no border patrol or passport check.  We drove to France first to shop for dinner provisions and then onto Freiburg, Germany, about 50 minutes away to tour and have lunch.

We returned to Basel for the evening, dinner and a round of Wizard, a new favorite card game.  

Sunday we took the tram to the Foundation Beyeler Museum to catch the last day of “Edgar Degas: The Late Work.”    Fabulous paintings gathered from museums and collections all over the world included many of his behind the ballet scenes and several of portraying women bathing and drying their hair.

A quick lunch and then back on the train to the Zurich airport.  Trains and buses go everywhere. Certainly we can learn a bit from our European friends about solving our transportation issues?