Swiss Alps & Venice ... Day Nine

One would expect after the last night in Munich that we would sleep in a little and wake up a little less than cheery.   It was probably the roughest morning of our entire trip, but we had a train to catch and things to do before hand, so we powered through.  Since it was so easy, we had breakfast in our hotel (I was a little less excited about it the second time around) and then finished packing.  We checked out a little early and then headed to the train station.  We had a day trip from Munich to Venice that went through the Swiss Alps.

Our early arrival to the station meant a stop in to Starbucks and another attempt at spelling Darrell:

The station, like most in Europe, was really open.  We were excited to finally see our train pull up, and we headed to find our seats for the journey.

We had decent seats, but I was surprised by how full this train was compared to any of the other ones that we had traveled on.  We had seats by each other and then had one lady that sat directly across from me.  She actually was seated in D's seat, but we just went along with it.  She traveled most of the way with us.

As the train started to depart, I decided to finally break in to some snacks.  Remember the amazing market from yesterday?  That's where these beauties came from, and I was so excited to open this bag up.  It was really hard not to just eat the whole thing.

 

I can not tell you how beautiful the scenery was on this train ride.  I tried to take pictures, but truly, they do not do justice to what your eyes take in.  It was my favorite train ride, and I highly recommend it for anyone traveling between Germany and Italy.   Below you can see the Alps as a beautiful background to one of the many amazing cities that we passed by.  At the beginning of our train ride it was pretty foggy and cloudy, but that burned off the farther south we got. .

It was such a picturesque area.  I can't image waking up this gorgeous scene every day.

There was so much to see, from castles built off the side of the mountains to frozen waterfalls.  My mouth seriously dropped as we approached this bridge.  Again, this picture doesn't capture the ridiculous height or the cars as they drove over this towering bridge.  I can't image actually driving over it personally, holy cow.

Then as we got farther and farther south, we saw more and more of the wine country.  Hills filled with vineyards as far as the eye could see and taking up every usable inch of space for the vines.  It was beautiful and made me wish we had a bottle of wine to enjoy on the way.

This was one of my favorite pictures from the train ride.  Of course it's filtered through Instragram, but it's just so darn pretty.  How can you not enjoy this scenery?!?

Multiple times on our trip we would actually go through a mountain and it would be completely dark.  The longest tunnel was about five minutes.  As we approached Venice the sun was setting, and by the time we got off the train and checked into our hotel, it was dark.  This is literally the view across the canal as you get off the train.

There is just something magical about the city on water.

The hotel was quite the experience and literally 200 feet from the station.  When we checked in, they asked to see our passports, which was a first, but seemed reasonable.  Then they proceeded to ask us to leave them with them for 10-15 minutes so they could finalize the check in.  I did not feel comfortable just leaving my passport with them.  We finally made it up to the room which was, by far, not the most amazing hotel.  It was small, but got us by for the one night that we were there.

This picture is a little blurry, but you can see that it's basically just a bed in a room slightly bigger and a bathroom.  We didn't stay in there long and headed out to see the city, even if it was dark.

We had such good food on the trip , but this was definitely one of my favorite meals.  My friend went on her honeymoon earlier this year, and said we had to eat at this restaurant.  She warned me that it was off the beaten path, but well worth the trip.  She wasn't lying.  We started walking towards the restaurant.  We luckily had D's GPS guiding the way because we were the only ones walking in the area.  It's not like Venice is the nicest or prettiest city, so being the only ones walking around didn't seem like a good thing.  I thought it took us way longer to get there then we expected, and we almost gave up, but finally we found it. 

We, of course, had to reward ourselves on finding it with a bottle of wine.  This was the start of many bottles of wine we indulged in throughout Italy and France.  

It was a cute little restaurant, not very large and not super busy by the time we got there.  Really, we were probably early considering how Italians eat. 

Our first course that we shared with the best pasta I had.  My mouth waters just looking at it.  These homemade noodles with a sausage (of sorts) and the most decadent sauce = pure heaven. 

I got a second course of fish, but what made it the best meal was dessert.  This tiramisu was the best thing ever.  I've not had tiramisu like this before and probably won't again.  It was so good!  I'm pretty sure I licked the glass.  No, not really, but I wanted to.  The little ginger biscuits that came with it, just topped it off. 

We were completely stuffed on the walk back to the hotel.  With our bellies full, we slept really great that night.