Rigi Cruise Arrivals

One Friday we got up to the mountain early to start welcoming our guests. Some of the first to arrive were my family. My parents, two aunts, and an uncle made up most of the small American contingent.

Once you took the 45-minute train ride up the mountain, you still had a 10-minute walk to get to the hotel. And like my friends learned, everything in Switzerland is up.

The hotel was old, but it was perfect for our size of group and for the fact that it was only our group there.

We hung Swiss welcome balloons on an umbrella you could see from the train station--"you only have to walk to those balloons!"

Everyone received a color-coded name tag, chosen for the languages you can speak, a package of Swiss cookies, and, of course, a Swiss Army knife.