Milan, Tirano, Zurich

We planned our vacation to be almost entirely one week stays in apartments. But we did plan one three day on the move jog to see the Alps. Early the first morning we took the train from Florence to Milan. We got to Milan at about 10:30. We stashed the backpacks at left luggage (three flights down from the train), got metro tickets and headed out to tour Milan. The roof of the Duomo was the highlight for us. It's Gothic and you can walk the slanted roof peering out through the gargoyles and looking down at the forest of flying buttresses. We picked up our luggage and took a 4:30 train to Tirano. Tirano is technically in Italy, but it's right on the boarder and most of the locals we dealt with spoke German. Getting there, the train follows Lake Como so the ride was very scenic. Following the lake it becomes terraced vineyards which are very pretty in their own way. We spent the night at the Hotel Bernina which is catty corning to both the Swiss and Italian railway stations. We shared the hotel with a tour group that arrived by bus just as we arrived by train. We had a good but expensive dinner there and an enormous continental breakfast the next morning. The point of Tirano was to take the Bernina Express which we did from Tirano to St. Moritz in the morning. We went on by regular train on the Bernina route to Chur. That is one amazing train ride the scenery is grand and the loops amazing. But I wouldn't get reservations for the panoramic window cars again. The view is nice, but the windows distort the view too much. In the regular cars you can pull down the windows and get better pictures. We got to Zurich in the late afternoon and walked the old part of town before and after dinner. In the morning we took the bullet train to Paris. All in all we liked our little jog, but I wouldn't want to do a whole trip of that kind of back to back travel.