On Thursday, October 16, we woke up to rain in Zürich. Hopefully the weather would be better in the south. We took the bus and tram to the Hauptbahnhof with plenty of time to catch our train (every once in a while Zürich Daddy Geek will humor my need to not arrive with one minute to spare). We picked up a newspaper and new sudoku book and went to find our reserved seats.
One minor complication. Someone was sitting in Little Geek Girl's seat. As in the forward facing window seat. She doesn't like to sit backwards and she doesn't like to sit next to strangers. Yes, we need to convince her that she can't always have her way, but when we can we try to see what we can do. (Yes, this means we have stood on a bus/trolley for 20 minutes due to lack of appropriate seats. She will sit on a parent's lap next to someone, but that's not fun for the parent. Sometimes she'll sit on her knees facing forwards in a backwards facing seat--if one of us is next to her.) The gentleman in her seat insisted that it was his seat, his company had reserved it for him, he spoke to someone on the train and they told him it was his seat. ZDG went to look for train staff to help out, but couldn't find anyone. The rest of the car was full of people already in their reserved seats. I explained to him LGG's seat preferences and if it wasn't absolutely critical that he have the window seat facing forward, could he please move to the window seat facing backwards. Otherwise, LGG would probably be very unhappy and whining for most of the three hour train ride. He conceded that what was most important to him was to have a window seat and he then changed seats. Fortunately he spoke English so we were not required to dig into our dictionaries for this exchange.
The rest of the train ride was uneventful. I had purchased rub-on decals especially for the train ride, so LGG happily colored and transferred decals. ZDG and I worked on our German homework.
We arrived in Lugano and it was overcast, but at least it was not raining. Because we had a travelpack and LGG with us, we decided to take the bus to our hotel. We were staying at the Hotel Colorado (yes, our last US state), which was offering 50% off the second night's stay during the month of October. Originally we had hoped to stay in Lugano for three nights, but we changed it to two nights after looking at the hotel rates. The hotel was not that full so we were able check in right away and drop off our stuff.
We walked down the hill to the lake front and were greeted by the following statue:
It was about a 10 - 15 minute walk into Lugano proper and we looked for a place to stop for lunch. We decided to go to the same place where Auntie Geek and I ate back in April, Bottegone del Vino. After about a ten minute wait we were seated. ZDG had rabbit, polenta with porcini mushrooms, and green beans, LGG had some pasta, and I had tuna tartare. The waiters there were really nice about trying to find a comfortable chair for LGG. At first they brought a high stool, but her knees ended up hitting the table, so they brought her two seat cushions. Also, they did not charge us for her pasta or her milk. At the end of our meal there was no sign of our waiter so we ended up asking for the bill from another waiter.
Afterwards we walked through the town to the funicular back up to the train station to catch the S-bahn to Melide for our visit to Swissminiatur.
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