UnTourist Jerry Nolan shares with us his memories of The Four Pass Tour in Meiringen, Switzerland. Many years ago when Sandy and I were making our first forays into Switzerland under the care of UnTours (which turned into a multi year love affair with the country and the company) we noted ads for something called “The Three…
Category Archives: Switzerland
Swiss Innovation: The Transport Museum in Luzern
Switzerland is well known for its excellent rail system, hearty enough to deliver you to mountain tops and punctual enough to set your watch by. Of course the Swiss transportation system goes far beyond trains to encompass boats, buses, gondolas, and cog rail, all synched to connect you to where you want to go. The…
Eating Switzerland: An Alumni Guide to Swiss Food
This post comes to us from Swiss UnoTur alumnus Jerry Nolan. Because my wife Sandy and I went to Switzerland summer after summer for many years before age and circumstance grounded us, I often find myself pining over memories of Swiss food. We always traveled with UnTours, that estimable travel company founded on the idea…
Jonathan Reports from the Swiss Untour, fall 2021
Jonathan Coleman is the Co-CEO of the UnTours Foundation. He just returned from his first trip to Switzerland, on a Swiss UnTour. Here are his impressions. When traveling, one meets interesting people. It’s an inevitable truth and an undeniable draw for those of us who feel the need to travel deep within our souls. When…
A Video Intro to the Swiss Untour
There are lots of reasons to love Switzerland and lots of reasons to travel there. We are excited to welcome our first guests back next month, and we are fielding questions and phone calls every day from guests with common questions about where to stay in Switzerland and how to set up a Swiss UnTour….
Remembering Albert Greutert
On June 11, UnTours lost its long-time friend and colleague in Switzerland, Albert Greutert. Albert and his wife Berit were apartment hosts from the earliest years of UnTours in the 1970s. Berit, Albert’s vivacious wife, was one of our earliest Swiss UnTour staff persons. Albert was not content to let Berit have all the fun….
Swiss Cheese: A Vocabulary Lesson
It pains me to think that I spent more than half of my life laboring under the delusion that Swiss cheese had anything to do with those shrink wrapped plasticky yellow bricks from the supermarket dairy case. I fondly remember the first time I smelled apenzeller. After experiencing the smells of the cows and the…
Swiss Yodeling, Yes, But Why? A Brief History
We travel with our eyes, yes, but also with our ears. And some of our favorite places have distinct, unique sounds, sounds that take us back to our experiences there when we hear them. Perhaps no sound is quite as evocative of place as Swiss yodeling. While it is performed for pleasure and entertainment now…
Swiss-mas Carols, Alpine Snow, and Cinnamon Stars: Holidays with Urs
We recently got this sweet message with video and photos from Urs, one of our favorite colleagues in Switzerland, known among our Swiss UnTour alumni for his positivity and his singing voice. We had to share his greetings, and a bit of his optimism. In Coronatimes, singers and yodlers like me have a hard time….
Six Things to See and Do in Thun, Switzerland
With its remarkable combination of history, setting, and culture, Thun is one of our favorite cities in Switzerland. Thun Castle overlooks the city and offers a wonderful view. As you walk the arcaded sidewalks of the old city, you’re constantly reminded of Thun’s medieval past. In its present, Thun offers regular open-air concerts on the…