When Iris returned from Munich we sat in the hotel for a few minutes discussing travel plans, then started driving south toward Austria, quickly crossing the border (there is no stop required). The landscape changed subtly until we were among rolling hills with views of large snow-covered mountains, shaped of twisted granite and carved by glaciers. The mountains of Austria have much in common with the California Sierras, or the northern Rockies.

We stopped for lunch in a small town but found that the two restaurants were both closed for the season. There was a trace of snow, and the nearby hills were white. We continued down the road to a somewhat larger town, Achenkirsch, where the Achenkirsch Poste Hotel was open for business. The restaurant there was quite good -- very authentic Austrian cuisine with tin plates, exotic and meaty dishes with long Austrian-German names ("What is this?" I asked Iris, who replied, "It translates as devil fish, but I don't know...")

We stayed at the restaurant for nearly two hours eating a three course lunch plus dessert and coffee. Decadent.

By the time we were on the road again the sun was getting low and was often lost behind the high hills. We made a wrong turn at one point and cruised the streets of Innsbruck looking for a way back onto the highway. By the time we got to the Lichstenstein border it was dark.

Lichtenstein is not a member of the European Union (it is part of Switzerland) so I was a little concerned about my passport requirements. The border is very loose, with no need to stop (if the car has the correct window sticker), but it worried me a bit that I would be leaving the EU here and entering a non-EU country, from which I would later depart Europe (leaving me with an entry stamp for the EU but no corresponding exit stamp). The guard at the border seemed unconcerned (or unwilling to investigate further) and simply waved us on.

Iris had called ahead and arranged for us to stay at the home of her boyfriend's parents in Zug, Switzerland. She now called them again on her mobile phone and told them we would be late. When we arrived it was nearly 9:00.

Bruno and Margrith Getzmann turned out to be extremely warm and friendly people. We shared pictures, ate fondue with brandy and local wine, and discussed things to see the next day. Both Bruno and Margrith have been studying English for many years; Bruno's English has a distinct South African accent, from some years he spent there when younger. Both of them (and their sons) are well-traveled. Their apartment is small and spare, but they have spent many accumulated months overseas, on vacations far from home including trips to America, Australia and many parts of Europe. They plan a trip to South Africa and Zimbabwe next year.

"Uncomplicated people," said Iris, and she meant that as a compliment.

I slept well in a small, closet-sized spare room and was out of bed early, at 7:00 AM. The others didn't stir until well after 8:00, so I had time to get a shower and shave before the inevitable jockeying began for the single bathroom. There was time also to catch up on notes, and type a few work-related emails while sipping berry tea and nibbling on sweet packaged biscuits.

It was Sunday, and we sat in front of the television watching the Swiss weather reports. It was foggy outside, but the live cameras that are placed at all the mountain resorts showed that there was sunshine and clear air above the low clouds. Iris and I decided to go to the top of Rigi, a mountain near Lucerne. First, though, we stopped and walked for a half-hour in the Lucerne city center, pausing at a crowded bakery for pastries and hot chocolate. Lucerne is a beautiful city, even on a cold and damp day. I looked at pictures in a guidebook and saw that in the summer the setting is spectacular, with high mountains dropping down to the large and many-fingered lake. It occurred to me that Lake Lucerne would be a nice place to rent a boat for a few days.

We drove to the gondola station in Wiggen, about twenty minutes from Lucerne. The hills around Wiggen were astonishingly pretty, again without the mountains in view (the clouds were very low). There were houses perched on hillsides accessible by long and winding roads, looking over the lake and the green farmlands below. I wondered what it must be like to live here, to sit and watch the view, uncrowded with cars and people and unspoiled by bad modern architecture. (Switzerland is a modern place to be sure -- the expensive cars, clothes and mobile phones attest to that -- but there seems to be a serious effort to preserve the unique Swiss look of the villages. Of course the organized efforts to preserve open spaces and farmlands has come at a price: Iris told me that homes are very expensive, and there are very few parcels of land available for new construction.)

The gondola took us up, through thick clouds, to a small resort about two thirds of the way up Rigi. Here there were a number of small hotels, a few vacation homes (one suspects they are extremely expensive homes), some shops and restaurants and the cog railway station. The cog railway actually runs all the way down to the highway, so we could have spent more time and taken it to this point rather than taking the gondola. But the gondola ride was exhilerating and quick, and we transfered to the railway at the gondola's upper terminus point to climb higher up the mountain.

At the top of the 2000+ meter mountain there was a huge concrete structure supporting a three-story hotel and two restaurants. A short walk away (through rather treacherous hard-packed snow and ice) was the summit, capped by a huge blue and red transmission tower and observation platform. Here there were many tourists, and one adventerous kite flyer who controlled a large parafoil in the summit winds, often leaving the ground himself for short flights as the kite pulled him strongly upward.

We were lucky: the sun was shining bright when we arrived and I got some nice pictures. The wind was blowing, but with a sweater and rainjacket it was not too cold. But as we made the decision to go back down, the mists suddenly swirled up from the valley and obscured the summit, the sun, and the view, causing the temperature to drop to well below freezing and the visibility to near zero.

We rode the cog railway down partway toward the gondola station, stopping for lunch at another restaurant that sat on a high shoulder of the mountain. The sun was shining here, although the summit appeared still to be hidden, and the valley below us was buried in clouds as well. The place was crowded and understaffed; service was very slow, but the food was good. I ate a dish of baked noodles and potatoes topped with rice, and a cup of corn soup, and chased it down with a bottle of Swiss beer (no comparison to the beers in Bavaria, but good nonetheless). We were there for over an hour before finally finishing the meal and settling the bill.

We rode the gondola down, packed in like cattle in the full car. Capacity was posted at 76, and we appeared to be close to that number of bodies in the bedroom-sized space. And it was unclear to me whether the three or four large dogs that had been brought on board were included in the count.

As we walked down the hill away from the gondola station and to the car, someone behind us called Iris' name. She turned and saw two friends (friend's of her boyfriend, that is) who had apparently been on the gondola with us.

Marcus and his wife lived, as it turned out, just a short drive away, up one of the winding hillside roads that I had admired earlier. They invited us for coffee and we followed them up the hill to a small but well-furnished apartment with two floors and a dramatic view of the lake and valley. We stayed for two hours, drinking coffee, Grappa and beer and eating cookies while talking about Switzerland. Marcus is a sailplane pilot and he showed pictures of the soaring club, and pictures of their travels in America. Both of them spoke fluent English, and all three friends dropped easily into English for my benefit. (I constantly admire well-educated Europeans for their language skills. It is not unusual at all for someone on the continent to be completely fluent in two or three languages and have an acceptable level of understanding of one or two more. Most educated Swiss, for example, will speak German, French, English and be able to follow conversations in Italian as well.)

A drive of one hour in the dark took us to Frick, a small town close to the Rhine River and close to the Protel Europe office. Frick was where I would stay for the next three nights, in a new and rather charmless little business hotel. Iris and I had a quick meal at the hotel restaurant, then she left for home.

In my Frick hotel room I quickly "flicked" through the television channels. After 11:00 PM the cable channels were saturated with soft-core porn, and some channels had bizzare shows that would rate a solid X if shown in the U.S.

There was nothing much to see on the tube, so I spent an hour with the computer (as long as its battery would allow, given the fact that my German power adapter would not fit into the holes of the Swiss power outlet) and caught up on notes. I was unable to send emails, however (the modem would not recongize the dial tone).

On Monday morning Iris picked me up from the hotel for the quick drive to the Protel office in nearby Sisseln. The office was a surprise; it is located in a sprawling and modern luxury home on the end of a dead-end street and on the bank of the Rhine river. Iris tolds me that the neighbors are not always happy about having a busy office with frequent guests on their otherwise quiet street. But the setting was impressive. The house is large even by American standards, and furnished with luxury touches like granite counter tops in the kitchen, and indoor/outdoor swimming pool (now covered and unused), a pool table and a dramatic back yard with brick patio and grass that sloped gently down to the river bank. (From the yard one could sit in the sunshine eating fruits while lobbing the pits and rinds across to Germany, whose territory begins mid-river.)

The house was converted to an office for Protel's benefit (it had previously housed three families as a shared rental unit), and there were network and phone cables strung here and there, computers and office supplies stacked in spare rooms, and file cabinets, desks and chairs squeezed creatively into the various bedrooms and large living spaces.

When lunchtime arrived, the four technical support engineers who I was training suggested we go over to Germany to have lunch. It was a short (five minute) drive to the small town of Stein, still on the Switzerland side of the river, where we parked the car. On foot, we crossed a covered wooden bridge (said to be over 400 years old) that spans the Rhine with thick age-darkened timbers pegged together and stiffened with old rusted iron bracketry. There was no passport control, or any other check made of people crossing from Stein. In fact there was no indication that we were entering another country (and remember, Switzerland is not a member of the EU) other than a faded white line halfway across and an old sign that said (in German) "You are entering Germany".

The small German city that the bridge led us to was a gem. Called Bad Sackingen, it is composed of narrow cobbled streets that wind in serpentine fashion around classy old buildings (or old-looking buildings -- many towns along the Rhine were extensively damaged during the war), beautiful churches and crumbling old fortifications.

We had lunch at an Italian restaurant that had, quite naturally, adapted its cuisine to local tastes. While I managed to avoid eating meat with this meal, everyone else had a small plate of spaghetti accompanied by a large plate of fatty pork or veal covered in brown gravy.

Later, after the training was finished and it was time to quit, Iris took me to visit her sister (and her sister's family) in Ennetturgi.

"I thought you might like to see how a Swiss family with children lives," she said.

The evening was thoroughly enjoyable; Stefan and Claudia are interesting people ("uncomplicated", said Iris) and we ate a dinner of quiche and wine, and a thin, fruit-topped pastry.

Their house was large, with three floors plus a basement. But it had been designed in a way that Claudia said is intended to be "earth-friendly". It is not a free-standing home, but actually shares a wall with another house next-door, part of row of four such homes. (From the outside I had assumed that the large building was an apartment complex with twelve flats. Instead it is four very tall homes connected as one structure, as you would find with a smaller townhouse.)

Other "earth-friendy" aspects of the house are a minimal number of non-recyclable materials, including extensive use of laminated beams, oriented strandboard forming paneling, and heavy tile or hardwood on the floors to act as temperature moderating surfaces. The windows are small, but well thought-out lighting and lighter colored walls and floors give the rooms a bright feeling.

Outside there was a shared courtyard scattered with children's toys (and easy to watch from the kitchen window) while the backyard was planted with vegetable and flower gardens and equipped with a frog and fish pond. (The eclectic design of the garden, including its large suit-wearing scarecrow, apparently raised some eyebrows among the more conservative-minded neighbors.)

After three hours of food, conversation and games (we play the original Swiss version of a game I remember from childhood as "Carom") we left the Spuhler home and I returned to my plain little hotel room in Flick. I "flicked" through the channels again; nothing but old movies, inscrutable talk shows and more porn. I pulled out a ragged book and did some reading, then went to bed.