My first long distance train travel in Europe! First of many, I’m sure.
I have too much stuff.
Luckily half of this stuff (my skis, boots, and winter gear) is only going as far as Zermatt, but it’s slightly more than I can carry reasonably, so I end up exhausted after the rather short walk to and from the train station. Luckily I have plenty of time to rest on the trains. This train ride is where I started processing my photos and preparing my blog posts. As I write and edit this, I’m preparing my next set of blog posts on a train on its way to Lucerne, so I think this will become a pattern for me.
Unsurprisingly, I find that half of my photos, the ones taken on my nicer camera, are in the wrong time zone compared to those from my phone. So half of this train ride is spent finding how to adjust the timestamp in the EXIF of my photos to line up, and then writing a little program that takes a folder full of photos from my two cameras, sorts them by picture date from the photo’s meta data, and renames them so that the filename order is chronological. This makes it easier to flip through them, delete the poorer redundant ones, and give them all labels.
The ride to Zermatt is full of many scenic views, which are not captured particularly well on my pictures taken through the train window. The most exciting bit was a little castle jutting out into Lake Geneva, but I wasn’t quick enough to get a good picture. I say “castle”, but for all I know it could have been a well-fortified granary, but I’m calling it a castle, darn it. The train was rather comfortable and rather empty.
I arrived in Zermatt, luckily found a tiny taxi (all of the cars are tiny in Zermatt, there’s few roads wider than 6 feet or so) that took me and my stuff to my home for the next week: Le Petit Hotel. The room is smallish, but cozy, and lots of storage so I can hang up all of my clothes and get all of my bags out of site, which makes it feel much more comfortable.
I spent the rest of the day wandering around Zermatt, having a late lunch (pretty good for inexpensive pub food), trying to find some Mtn Dew (failing), finding a grocery store with food for dinner instead.
As I retired to my room for the evening, a gentle snow was falling on the town outside my window.
Jimbly's Wanderings 