The Sawyer Stories

At this point in our trip, the ultimate goal is to get to our final destination, London. The easiest way to get from Rome to London is of course to fly. Speed and efficiency, however, were not our goal. We wanted exploration. Insert day 18, traveling for the sake of traveling.

Highlight from Day 18:

• We woke up fairly early in our Rome Airbnb. We had done most of the packing the night before to prep for the early morning. We took a taxi to the Rome station because at this point in the journey, we were all a bit over carting our luggage great distances.
  
• We had a quick breakfast of ever so European croissants at the station before jumping on a fast and fancy Trentalia train. These were our nicest train seats yet with leather reclining seats and of course a table in between.
  

• This was a 4 hour train ride through Italy from Rome to Milan. We spent our time playing games, starring out the window, writing blog posts, and taking it all in.
  

• Amber was (nerdily) excited when we stopped at Reggio Emilia because of the education philosophy birthed out of there.
  

• Once in Milan we had a quick hour to grab food before our next train. When we originally booked this trip, we envisioned going into Milan for a quick peek around. These naive Sawyers forgot we had bags. Not quite enough time to venture out. So, we grabbed lunch at the train station. This station was busy, big, and beautiful. It reminded us of pre-pandemic Union Station in DC.
  

• We then hopped on our next train to Zurich. Well, hopped on sounds simple. This was actually pure chaos. They didn’t post a track until the train had already arrived. This meant hundreds of people were trying to get off while hundreds of people were trying to get on in a matter of minutes. It was bottlenecked madness. This meant we had to jump on the train in the wrong car and trapes down the narrow aisles with our bags. We couldn’t quite make sense of our tickets for our car and seats. We asked the well-meaning porter for guidance who then sent us in the wrong direction. I just wonder what the lovely passengers already in their seats, though, as we walked past them several times. We finally found our seats in the family car this time.
• Zurich was not originally a planned stop for us. We wanted to take a long train ride through the Alps and the original plan was to take it to Paris. Insert the Olympics, and we needed a plan B (we will save France for a future trip).
  
• We’ve been to gorgeous beaches and cities, but the mountains of the Alps on this train ride were breathtaking. So vast and so gorgeous. While I’ve tried to document this whole trip well with photos, I didn’t actually take much on this trip, and the ones I did take did not nearly do it justice. You’ll just have to take our word for it and take this train trip. We were toward the back of the train, so my favorite part was watching the train snack around curves and head into mountain tunnels. It felt oh so Hogwarts Express.

• We enjoyed more game playing. One thing Michael and I always do when we play 5 Crowns is split the deck and shuffle before one final shuffle together. Today happens to be our 18th wedding anniversary, so we proved our connection and compatibility with our excellent combined shuffling skills.

• After 8 hours on the train, we hungrily arrived in Zurich. We made our way to our hotel to drop our bags and find a restaurant. We were excited to find a vegan/vegetarian buffet, Hiltl. This is the first vegetarian restaurant in the world and it’s huge! There were 40+ different dishes and 2/3 were vegan. Here you make a plate and pay per weight. We cheers to celebrate our anniversary and delicious mounds of food.

• We ended our evening with a slow stroll through Zurich, stopping at the waterfront to watch the swans. We love soaking in another beautiful European city.