Rapperswil; Sunday, 23 April, 2023

Sundays in Switzerland are very quiet with most shops closed, but thankfully at least some of the museums are open so I headed out of the hotel and over to my first stop of the day at the city museum or Stadtmuseum. The museum is housed across three buildings – an ancient tower building, a 15th century merchants house and a 21st century link building that joins the other two together.

Whilst all the signage inside the museum was just in German with no other explanations it was still pretty easy to follow along with the history of the city from it’s original founding through it’s industrial past and then its rebranding as a tourist resort at the end of the 19th and early 20th century, as well as discovering that the city still has a reasonable amount of industry – particularly around toilets and sanitary ware – located in the vicinity.

From the Stadtmuseum I had intended on visiting the castle and the museums in there, but the castle was undergoing renovation work at the time of visiting and was closed off to the public, so instead I wandered back down into the old town and visited the Rose Garden that is build onto the slopes of the castle hill.

Just behind the rose garden is a small Capuchin friary that is still working and is open to the public to look around so I had a quick look around inside there before heading down to the harbour area to take in some of the prettiest views of the city from both arms of the harbour wall.

By now I had pretty much exhausted all of the sites that there were in the city, and as I had a valid day ticket I decided to head out of town on a scenic train ride to fill up some time.

From Rapperswil I caught the train up to the junction town of Rüti where I changed onto the regional stopping train that heads up into the highlands above the lake and towards the second city of the canton – Winterthur. The journey was incredibly pretty with lots of green rolling hills, mountains and a couple of ravines along the way.

From Winterthur I caught the train back in towards Zurich and in the city centre swapped onto the tram-train S18 line that heads up into more of the highlands behind the lake and city over to the town of Esslingen. From there I was able to hop, almost straight away, onto a bus – you just have to love the Swiss Integrated transport – over to the town of Uster where I could pick up the regular S-Bahn train back down to Jona and from there walk back to the hotel – for a round journey of about three hours.