Switzerland

As always, we're way behind in updating you folks. Trying to catch up a little this morning as James is off and we're waiting to catch a flight. More on that later.

In February, James was doing yet another road show. These are usually grueling events, where you spend about 6 hours in each city and run to catch a plane to the next one. However, now that there are 3 people on the team here, we were able to break it up some and do some customer meetings between the actual presentations. The entire event was impacted by weather, as it was snowing all over Europe for 2 weeks. James got stuck in Stockholm as all the airports in London were snowed in. Then the London event was hampered by snow so everyone attended remotely. Same with Frankfurt. The last stop was Zurich, Friday, Feb 13.

So we went to Switzerland for Valentine's Day weekend. Again, snow impacted it as James was delayed getting out of London by snow in Zurich. Diana arrived late Thursday and we hoped for the best.

While James worked on Friday, Diana played tourist. She went up to a mountain (hill) overlooking Zurich where everyone was sledding down. I took a train up from the city. On the way up several people got on the train with their toboggan sleds. At the top I had to walk about a half a mile to the summit to get the view of the city. The Swiss were enjoying the snow they usually don't get this amount of snow. Instead of taking the train down I walk back down to the city via the walking paths in the mountain(hill). The only sound in the forest was birds and small mountain streams and your own foot steps it was a great experience.

Zurich has several churches famous for their stain glass windows. You could not take any pictures so I picked up some post cards of them.

On Friday night, she found a country and western festival in town. We shared a table with some great people and had a really good time. The first band was led by a guy from SC, and they weren't very good. The second was a Canadian band and they rocked. A few original songs and lots of covers. James got his dance card punched for 2009.

Then on Saturday she booked us a trip to the Jungfraujoch, one of the highest peaks in Switzerland. There's a cog train that climbs all the way to the summit, some 11,000+ feet. In places, it actually goes through the mountain and has places you can detrain and look out through viewing areas.

At the summit of the mountain, it was -27C (-17F). We only stayed out in it long enough to take the pictures. The coolest thing here was the glacier. They had actually carved walking trails through the inside of the glacier. I can't imagine how deep the snow was here.

Because of the altitude you had to move very slowly. Take it from us it was hard to breath and walk.

James is yet again playing with some new ways to show the pictures and trying to convey the spirit of what we experienced. He's put it all in a video this time, tell us how it works for you and how you like it.

From Switzerland