You can go (at least to Switzerland) home again!

You CAN go home again……………..


……….at least to a second home, which we consider Switzerland! We took the fast train from Montpellier in France to Bern, caught a cab and arrived at a familiar restaurant, Burgenziel, with our three big suitcases in tow. We arrived just in time for kisses, hugs and enthusiastic greetings from attaché friends – 13 couples from 8 different countries - followed by a delicious typical Swiss meal.

It truly seemed like we’d never been away from one another. We all assured each other that 14 years hadn’t made any difference. None of us changed a bit!!! Needless to say, that part was a bit of baloney, but it was just so easy to chat with one another again and quickly catch up with one another’s lives, as if we had not been apart for 14 years.

Looking good in the Alps!

Early the next a.m., some of the hardier ones (including the Farrells!) took to the mountains. We took a gondola high up above Grindelwald into the alps and then hiked a fairly even ridgeline for a couple of hours until we reached Grosse Scheidegg – our goal for wine and beer. A bus down the very narrow and winding mountain got us back to our car and a bit of looking around Grindelwald – a lovely, but busy tourist town.

Super Puma taking us to the Alps

We were delighted the next morning to rise even earlier (and it’s not even Peru), load into busses to the local airport, and then be transported by helicopter to a military establishment in the Valais – the Rhone valley running from the high alps down into the Lake of Geneva. Rance and other former attaches were heard to say “God, it’s nice to feel so important again”. And the Swiss did, indeed, make us all feel that way. First, we were a bit surprised even to visit this fortress – it had been built over the years into a very formidable and secret bastion, bristling with hidden guns and cannons. With the end of the Cold War it had been opened up and converted into a training facility for the military and civilian police, stressing their cooperation in a way that Posse Comitatis would never allow. I talked to several of them about how my son Thorsten was coping with military support in his job in the Border Patrol in NM – different rules for different folks. We were also given a tour of the underground defensive facilities, dug deep – and I mean deep – into the mountain blocking the pass – in fact the whole mountain was a well concealed, seemingly impregnable stronghold, at least until the development of laser guided bombs. Now it seems more like a museum piece, but as an artillery officer I still enjoyed the mechanics of it. And we all enjoyed the spectacular views we got from its top! (Great fields of fire)

View from the helicopter up the Rhone
In typical attaché fashion, we returned in time to clean up quickly and get back to the Burgenziel, where the attaché group entertained about 15 couples from the Swiss military with whom various attaches had worked when they were assigned here. Again, 14 years had changed no one even a little bit (liar! liar! pants on fire!)! Disregarding the invisible years, it was just so comfortable to be with these friends.