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11 October 2026 - Schweiz

I slept 14 hours last night. On the train this morning from Zürich to Luzern a mother and daughter from Hawai'i sat across from me and we chatted most of the way. The daughter is doing her masters in Zürich and the mother came to visit, so they were out looking to find some snow. This is a mission I undertood well. When we lived in the southeast I had a rule with my kids that, if it snowed and school wasn't cancelled, then I would write them a sick note so they could stay home and play in it. Finding snow in the mountains on vacation was always a highlight and often a mission.

After Luzern was the short trainride to Werthenstein, where I visited the cloister back in May. Today's hike started at the Bahnhof on the other side of the Kleine Emme river though. It was a climb up the hill to the rolling farmland that dominates the landscape in this part of Switzerland. It was a cloudy and sometimes cold day, which makes for good hiking weather. Unusual for Switzerland I also saw plenty of other camineros throughout the early afternoon.

The town of Buholz has a chapel on the outskirts and a church in the center. And on the two altars of the church are two reliquaries containing skulls which one could probably say adds to the Halloween feel with the pumpkins for sale at the barn across the street, but it made me feel like one of the Goonies. The fountains in town were dry, but there was a Hofladen selling fruits and nuts. Then in Geiss the church was less macabre, water flowed from the fountain, and there was a restaurant, although I did not stop. Since I didn't get started until 11:30 and I wanted to complete these two segments, I didn't have time to dally. And at this point my misreading of the distance of the second led me to believe that it was only 24 kilometers total.

Willisau, the next town, is an impressive seven centuries old and has the medieval Altstadt to prove it. Reaching there at 3PM I had made a good 4 km/hr pace so far, so I thought the last 10 km would be easy. As I sat there drinking a beer I looked at the map and realized that the next segment was 16, not 10, kilometers. This made the prospect of completion somewhat more tenuous, but I resolved to try all the same. There were two train stations in between and when I left the Willisau bar at 4PM if I could keep up the 4 km/hr pace then I would be at the Huttwil train station by 8PM, just after dark. This segment was in the hills above the valley where the trainline went and the trail often skirted the fields at the edge of the forest that was on the parts of the hillside too steep to farm.

In Huttwil I stopped first at an envangelical church, where the people set up for some event were very confused about me looking for a stamp. Eventually I found it though near another entrance and they realized that it was a Jakobsweg thing. Then I stopped at an Indian restaurant to grab a beer to go with my sandwich, but on display next to the Kingfisher was a viognier bottle. So I decided to get that instead and ordered a wrap even though I still had the sandwich from the morning in my bag. On the train I discovered that the viognier was from India! It was a Maharashtra viognier, and a pretty good one, too.

Back in Luzern there were, as always, many soldiers moving about the train station, but I noticed that, unusually, none of them appeared to have guns. I wonder if that's a new thing - gun in the bag rather than slung over the shoulder. Back in Zürich I just missed the train that goes to Erlenbach, so at the late hour I had to wait half an hour for the next one. Strange the things that feel inconvenient because of what one's become accustomed to.