Completing Via JacobiPrevious | Books | Film | Index | 日本語 | Photos | Training | Next |
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13 May 2024 - Lausanne
Today Paula and I hiked over 35 kilometers to finish the last section of the Via Jacobi across Switzerland. 450 kilometers from Rorschach on the Bodensee to the French border past Genève. Paula's been with me for most of the miles, but today really pushed her limits. We stopped for naps and swims in the forest. Iwona and Eddie walked with us for the first 9 kilometers early in the morning before she had to crack open her laptop and put in a day's work. I finished at Lausanne cathedral, in the city that has given so much to me even though I have never lived there. I am an American through and through, but living in Switzerland I see every day what America could have been. Corruption tarnishes my homeland in a way that seems alien to the Swiss. Local control of the majority of tax revenue makes a big difference. The federal government is begger to the towns, and not vice versa as in the US. The past two days days I have been hiking in Romondie, the French part of Switzerland. I live in the German part. Culturally it's hard to imagine Europeans further apart than the French and Germans, but here they cooperate on what they agree on. Multiple nations inside a country is something only Switzerland managed to hold onto through the 20th century in Europe. Having walked end to end, having visited every canton, having had many conversations in German and French with locals (and a few speaking Spanish at Italians), I feel at home as part of a quarter of the country that're immigrants.
