Swiss Trails

I've visited Switzerland once, and that was in fall 2005. It's great to spend time in another culture. When you experience how other folks live and how they get things done, you see yourself and your own way of life in new light. The Swiss compulsion for precise timing - for example buses arriving the very minute printed on the schedule - was startling as was the compulsion for very clean streets - no scrap of litter survived an hour.

Hikers of all ages could be found everywhere. Acres of land here and there were devoted to farming, a patchwork of fields. I don't recall fences but remember the unpaved trails along the edges and sometimes across the fields. Hikers had the liberty to use those trails to cross the properties owned by others. Where trails crossed, there were simple wooden signs on posts that gave the distance (in kilometers) to the next villages or crossings, as though the town was a national park, open to all, or as though the main means of travel in Switzerland was by foot.