Today was our first day in Europe. Nevermind the fact that we hadn't really slept in many hours...

We got off the plane in Zurich and tried to convince ourselves that it was 6:30 in the morning (instead of 9:30 p .m. the previous day). We cleared customs (and the customs officer actually STAMPED my passport, yay!) and got our Railpass validated so we could travel from the airport station into the main city station. It was more like a MAX than an actual train.

Once we got there, we wandered around Zurich taking a self-guided walking tour listed in the Rick Steve's guidebook we had downloaded back in the states (we plan to take lots of similar walking tours because they are inexpensive and interesting). We were wearing our backpacks with all of our gear for the whole trip in them. Fortunately, we have packed lightly (both packs weighing in at around 20 lbs) and were able to strut around town taking it all in as Zurich awoke.

We started at the train station and visited cobblestone alleys, walked along the waterfront, listened to the pipe organ play in St. Peter's Church, browsed a farmers' market and generally enjoyed taking pictures and telling each other, "We are in Europe!" and "Isn't this beautiful?"

When we had finished walking around, we hopped onto a train and used our Railpass again to travel to Luzern. The scenery was beautiful.

Hi, it's Bryan. While we were in Europe, Merilee wrote the entries for our travel blog, with some input from me. I'm going back through our blog and editing or adding pictures. I'm also going to try to add some comments to each entry sort of looking back on that day now that we are home. So, the italics in the entries will be new comments from me.

We couldn't have had a better day to arrive in Zurich. The sun was out and it was beautiful. We had arrived early enough in the day that the streets were mostly quiet. We didn't have any major sights to see, we were just taking in the the city and really enjoying stretching our legs after the long flight. It ended up being a really nice break before boarding the train and heading to Lucerne where we would spend our first two nights.