The Adventures of Dave & Cass: Big Bucks in Zurich!

We arrived in Zurich 300kms from our last stop in Austria. Zurich – the home of banking. Unfortunately for us Switzerland meant big bucks draining from our bank account into the swiss ones.

Our first shock came with the fees for a motorway vignette – 40 Swiss Franks for a 12month pass (and you couldn’t get any less time).

Then it was onto Camping Seebucht on the shore of the lake. These guys slammed us with a bill of 42swiss franks before telling us that this didn’t include showers – eek!

Lake Zurich

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We didn’t dare look at the cost of food or drinks in their bar/restaurant overlooking the lake and settled in for some spicy stirfry (home made of course) and finished with an evening stroll along the lake front.

Despite being a little low the next day – both on mood and finances, we thought we should really check out the city of Zurich. Even though it was a Sunday and not much was open we still managed a fairly good look around starting at the Northern end of Lake Zurich ad heading down one of the river inlets towards the centre of town where we utilised some free Macca’s wifi (hey something had to be free here!)

Zurcih city from the lake

We continued down the Bahnhofstasse the elite shopping street of Zurich. This street is also rumoured to have billions of dollars of gold bullion under it, in the vaults of the various banks that also line the street.

The Bahnhofstrasse - we tried digging through the pavement but no luck :(

From here we headed to St Peterkirche (the church of St Peter) which we could only see from the outside as it was closed (weird the one place you expect to be open on a Sunday is a church). No matter we got to see what we had come for – Europes largest clockface on its 13^th century tower.

St Peterkirche

Lastly we visited the Fraumunster – the Cathedral of Munich, that had some very different stained glass windows. They were almost a naive style. All in all the cathedral was pretty plain in comparison to the ones we had already seen in Austria and especially the Italian ones.

Afterwards we headed back along the river towards the lake, passing by an all women’s outdoor sunbathing area – AKA a wooden deck on the river where a whole bunch of women sunbake topless.

We finished up in Zurich and headed deeper into Switzerland to Luzern. Another city on the lake but this one featured entry bridges to the old medieval city via the famed covered bridges.

Medieval bridges leading into the city

These bridges have paintings all along their length hanging in the rafters. The prettier of the 2 – the Kapellbruke (Chapel Bridge) was partly destroyed by a fire in 1993 and all but 2 of the painted panels were ruined. Since then work has begun on placing print replicas up in their places.