Frauenfeld-Zürich

Yesterday: Dornbirn

My flight home leaves Sunday morning, so Paris and I decided to go to Zürich today and spend the night to make it easier to get to the airport in the morning. Plus we can stop at a brewery or two along the way. Our first stop was Brauhaus Sternen in Frauenfeld.

After a wrong turn or two, Paris convinced me to ask a local to point us at the brewery; after that, it was easy to find, only about 500 meters from the Bahnhof. To be honest, we weren't all that impressed...the beers weren't very good, the service was virtually nonexistent, and the bill was positively extortionate.

We walked back to the Bahnhof and caught the next train to Zürich Flughafen. A very helpful woman at the Information Desk helped us find a nearby hotel, made us a reservation, and pointed us at the shuttle bus. Shortly we arrived, checked in, and asked the front desk to call a taxi to take us downtown. They told us it would be much cheaper to go back to the airport and take a train in, so back on the shuttle bus we go.

The S16 train runs directly from the Flughafen to the Hardbrücke station, and from there it's just a 500-meter walk to Steinfels Back & Brau. (I forgot my damn camera at the hotel, or there'd be a picture here.) The beers were better here, and the food was really good, and while the service wasn't as invisible here as at Sternen, it sure seemed like we were being ignored. These two brewpubs were the only places we encountered poor service; perhaps not coincidentally, these were the only places that used the American model of hiring college-age kids to tend the bar and wait tables.

We decided to call it an early night due to the early morning tomorrow, but the temptation of the cleverly named "Hotel Bar" overcame us. We stopped in for a couple of Löwenbräu Zürich Löwen Weisse, and I lamented the fact that it would essentialy be my final beer of the trip.

Tomorrow: Zürich-Amsterdam-St.Paul-Omaha-Columbus