Very early start today as we had a train to catch at 7.17am to take us through to St Moritz so up at 5.30am to make sure we had enough time to get ready & get to the station well-ahead of the departure.

That all worked fine and we arrived about 30min before the scheduled departure time so we got some breakfast & waited for our train ... and that's where the fun started.

After a while, we noticed that there was a station attendant standing on our platform, where our train was meant to be & she was directing people who came up to her outside for some reason.

When I went over to see what was going on, she told us that our train had been cancelled & replaced by a bus that was leaving at 7.40am from just outside the station so we should go out there & one of her colleagues would be there to direct us. We also wouldn't need to worry about our connections as everything would be fine. Hmmmm

Apparently, there was a train strike on today ... the 9th one in 10 months! That's not good! 2/3 of all long-distance trains have been cancelled! Great!
 
Anyway, we went outside, there was no colleague so we waited for a while, asking every bus driver we could find whether they were the replacement for our train but all the buses seemed to only be going to the airport .

Found some Americans & some Asians who were in the same boat as us so we all started running around, trying to find what to do & getting more concerned that there was no bus.

Somehow we need to get to St Moritz as we are booked on the Glacier Express for tomorrow morning!

I went back inside & spoke to the same lady plus another guy who both just said to go outside where we'd been standing. This isn't working!

After several trips in & out of the terminal plus quite a few misdirections (including one guy who said we needed to go 500m down the road!), I went back inside to the ticket counter & explained what had happened. He re-booked us on different trains, now leaving at 9.19am & arriving in St Moritz at 5pm ... 3 hours later than planned with 4 train changes.

We breathed a sigh of relief and went out to our new-found American & Asian friends to let them know the happy news! Yay! We can get to our destination today!

At least this train arrived & left on time so we were finally on our way to St Moritz!

Since we had some quite lengthy legs (on the train trip that is), I decided to use the time to interview Mum & write down her story. I knew generally some of the parts of her story but had never written it down or figured out what happened in what order .

It was really interesting as she recounted so many memories from her childhood, all the way up until my childhood & the passing of my Dad when I was 10. I was typing away for about 3 hours & now have tons of invaluable notes about her life & some of the things that happened along the way.

I'm not sure how this will go since the trains and their occupants were quite noisy sometimes but I also recorded our conversations!

We sped on through green meadows, farms, tiny picturesque villages nestled into the mountains and snow! Yes, LOTS of snow once we got up into the alps. Unseasonably, it had snowed just the day before so there was snow everywhere. When we arrived in St Moritz, we could see that about 20cm of snow had fallen the day before ... COOL!

Sherry was waiting for us at the train station & it was so nice to see her again! Because we've both been doing so many things, it feels like AGES since I've seen her. Sherry had already been doing heaps of things around town, including walking around the lake & getting her feet thoroughly soaked in the snow & slush.

After we checked-in, she tour-guided us around town as we walked through the main streets and down around the lake a bit more, before heading back for some dinner, a few last photos, then zzzzzzzzzzz