Rapperswil: 23 km

Text and Photos by Kimberly Cecchini

We are writing at a table in front of our hotel and an inebriated Spaniard -who works at a Romanian power plant-has taken up residence next to us with a beer cursing about Obama and Putin and his daughter for not yet having a good job. He keeps apologizing, “I’m sorry about my mouth,” and then he starts anew, “This hippie shit. Everybody’s nice and you’ll see that here…it’s f—ing stupid.”

I keep typing. My husband’s more patient. The drunken monologue, if nothing else, is an interesting end note to a day of rambling about.

We had started on a stroll along Lake Zürich in the late morning, stopping to eat lunch on a rock slab where folks were taking dips and sunbathing. We looked over a cartoonish map while we munched and picked out a picturesque bridge -Holzsteg Rapperswil-as a goal for a trek outside the city limits.

We walked and walked through neighborhoods of picturesque homes and cafés lining cobble streets leading back to the lake. Across the busy thoroughfare, apartment buildings and stores climb the side of a hill up to the train tracks. We paused to lounge in small public parks on the shore and peered around the lake’s bend to see of we could catch sight of the now fabled bridge. We walked on, until after 3 hours, the suburbs gave way to wineries and goat pastures.

Finally, we saw a sign for the bridge’s locale that gave the missing perspective to our ‘map’: Rapperswil: 23 kilometers

Damn. I just heard our new buddy nail dramatically nail my inner recollection, “It’s a cruel world.” We turned back towards the city.

But I suppose the world is not so cruel, because we were able to take cover before the downpour and recover our tracks in 15 minutes by way of the city’s water taxi.