Sunday, June 19, 2016 - Munich to Zurich - If it's Sunday, it must be Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland

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Our Munich adventure came to and end with a phenomenal dinner Saturday night. It was at a restaurant where the chef-owner is the brother of Chuck's next door neighbor. I may do a separate entry on that. Today, we headed out Germany by way of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, drove almost the length of Austria, crossed Liechtenstein, and went on to Zurich. Along the way, we had two objectives: finding sapsago cheese in the beautiful Swiss canton of Glarus, and seeing the Glares thrust fault in the same area. Skunked on both. As we later learned, the local name for sapsago is schabziger,and although we did not see any in the store it may have been available if we had known what to call it. We grew up eating sapsago grated onto pumpernickel bread with butter.

As for the thrust fault, our trip-long nemesis weather finally caught up with us. I wanted to see it because it is the archetypical thrust fault where younger rocks get pushed up over older rocks. Recognizing this is one of the discoveries that eventually led to plate tectonic theory, although the fault was accurately described in the mid-1800's and plate tectonic theory did not come along until the 1950's. But for our entire trip there has been rain. WE have only had 3-4 really sunny days. Until now it had not really interfered with our plans, but today the low clouds keep us from seeing anything in the mountains. Still, we got the see the Glarus Canton, and it is the prototypical Swiss landscape of mountains with brilliantly green meadows extending up the hillsides, with cows grazing in the meadows and little wooden houses and farm buildings dotting the valley landscape. I keep expecting to see Heidi running across the road. I don't know that I have ever seen more waterfalls in a single day - the tend to fall long distances from the clifftops to the rocks below, and MANY were several hundred feet long.

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Comments

[Robbie]

Now you know why mother loved Switzerland!