Hellllllo, this is the first post of a few that I will be making to document my trip to Switzerland in September of 2019!
Earlier in 2019, my boyfriend Austin and I chose Switzerland as our big destination for one main reason – cheap flight. This is pretty much how I always choose my destinations and in my opinion, it is the best way. We were initially looking at Spain a little bit, but once we saw flights to Switzerland in the $300s, we had to go. The flight was out of Boston (we live in Cleveland), but we decided it was still worth it because we could do a little DIY action and take a pretty cheap Spirit flight from CLE -> BOS.
Would I recommend this? It depends if you value your time or your money more. Time is money I guess but it makes me feel rugged to do things the cheap and rugged way so whatever that’s what we did.
The way we did our trip was:
Friday CLE -> BOS
Saturday explore BOS – fly BOS -> LIS – layover in Lisbon, Portugal – LIS -> ZRH and arrive in Zurich, Switzerland.
We left from CLE on Friday September 6 and arrived in Boston that night after a quick flight. Unfortunately we waited a super long time to book our hotel, and Boston is EXPENSIVE. We booked a hotel through my credit card points that was actually pretty expensive by my standards for one night, but was in a very scary area. When we were getting close, this was the convo with the Uber driver:
Driver: Do you guys know this isn’t a great area?
Me: Ummm… now we do
Driver: Where are you going?
Me: Best Western
Driver: …
Me: Are we like, going to die?
Driver: Don’t go outside
HELLO??? I assumed then and there that we were getting murdered in our sleep. He pulled the car up to literally a foot away from the hotel door onto the sidewalk (please settle down sir) and we were fine but still……… welcome to Boston. Anyway the next day the guy working at the hotel drove us to Quincy Market and gave us a little tour/explanation of Boston for free so it worked out.
Once we got to Quincy Market, we pretty much just walked around everywhere for multiple hours exploring and killing time until our red eye flight that night.
definitely not staged 
we lucked out and got such a pretty day 
In Boston, we got dropped off by the hotel driver at Quincy Market, explored inside, and then walked around somewhat following points along the Freedom Trail to see notable historic sights. They hold tours for the Freedom Trail, but you can also just look it up and follow it yourself which is what we did. We hung around Boston Common for quite some time because it is such a beautiful park and there’s a lot within walking distance.
We headed to the airport in the late afternoon to get on the first leg of our flight to Portugal. We flew on TAP Air Portugal and splurged a little bit on the economy + legroom seats which was amazing. The first leg of our flight was around 6 hours to Portugal. The layover was the most chaotic thing of my life, because it was the middle of the night in Eastern time, but like super early in the morning (maybe 7am?) when we landed in Portugal. Barely any of the restaurants were open at that time so we were lowkey suffering but we made it. We also had to take a bus from the gate to our actual plane which is always a wild time.
Oh and the other wild thing about Portugal is that they had indoor smoking booths. They also had a voice constantly reading out various instructions in multiple languages over the PA system which was *chef’s kiss* a great touch and not annoying at all.
When we finally got to Zurich, we had to freak out and figure out where to buy our train passes (more on those later no doubt) and then decided to get an Uber to the hotel instead of using said train passes because it was raining and we were too dead inside to figure out which trains to take and lug our luggage (hmm… just occurred to me that lug and luggage are related) across town to the hotel.
When we landed in Zurich, it was Sunday. Did we spend basically 3 days traveling from Cleveland to Zurich? Yes. Would I do it again? Probably.
Everything is closed in Zurich on Sundays. I read that sentence multiple times from multiple sources before our trip, but it didn’t stick. Everything is closed on Sundays in Zurich. We basically wandered around in the rain that first day trying to avoid going to sleep at 3pm and ate fries at an Irish pub. Don’t worry though, things only improved from then on.
The next post will be all about Zurich and Lucerne! Lucerne is definitely one of my top 3 cities that I have ever been to, so I am super excited for that post! Stay tuned y’all.
venture with vick 