Zermatt and the Matterhorn

We left Grindelwald early today and took a couple of trains to get to Zermatt, the home base for sights of the famous Matterhorn mountain. We chose not to spend the night here, but stopped in for a few hours and locked our luggage at the train station. There was some light snowfall up there last night, and a lot of it was blowing, so we only got partial views.

Zermatt had lots of tourists and lots of tourist shops. It's kind of what we expected, which is why we only stayed here a little bit. We took in the sights and snapped our photos and then got back on a train to start our "Glacier Express" on the cheap trip.

The Glacier Express is a Swiss Tourism creation that allows you to go on one tourist train from Zermatt to Chur or St. Moritz or the reverse trip. It's one of the world's great train rides, and while you won't see any glaciers from the train, the views are out of this world. Our pass covers it, but we would need to pay a $45 reservation fee. Two weeks ago, I found out that the Glacier Express trains are booked up 3 months in advance! I was bummed.

But, I found out later that anyone can take the local trains on the same route. The only difference is that you need to change trains a couple times and the normal train cars don't have the larger windows and a partial glass ceiling. Since we have a first class Eurail pass, we ended up having a better experience, I think. Our first class car had large glass windows and there was hardly anyone on them! So instead of a full car with an assigned seat, we could change to wherever we wanted on an almost empty train car.

We'll break up this normal one day trip into two days, and then do the same thing on the Bernina Express, another classic Swiss train route that goes from Chur to just over the border to Tirano, Italy.

More photos and videos are here. https://photos.app.goo.gl/fK4MoVKjXtRN2WFk6Read more