My five day trip to Switzerland for the start of the spring feast was a pleasant adventure.

The trip was supposed to start on Tuesday, April 11th at 9:12 a.m. from the Siegburg-Bonn ICE high-speed train station for a six and a half hour trip to Wattwil, Switzerland. But the start was delayed about 30 minutes when the train was late. Someone had jumped in front of another train somewhere between Düsseldorf and Cologne, causing a last-minute change in the route for my train. (Suicides of this type are not uncommon in Germany.) So I arrived one hour late in Wattwil to stay with my hosts, the Betschart family (in the picture from the left: Jolanda, Verana, Benjamin and Kai). It had snowed the day before, so there was about 8 inches of snow on the ground, and in places where the snow had been removed, the piles were 3 feet high. After dinner with the Betscharts, Jolanda, her mom Verana and I drove about 40 minutes to the home where we had the Passover service, with 23 people present.

The next day we had time until evening to tour around the local area. After everyone had gotten up (we didn’t get to bed until around midnight the night before), we drove to a nearby "Heimatmuseum" featuring various household items from 100-200 years ago. The museum was the life’s work of a Swiss schoolteacher who taught school in a mountain village. He made a hobby out of collecting old tools, toys and other household items when they were discarded in favor of "progress". When his teaching career ended he assembled all the items in a house he acquired for the purpose of housing the museum. The house had several "house organs", the result of Swiss Reformation theologian Huldrych Zwingli’s influence. Zwingli believed that having musical instruments played during church services distracted people from worshipping God, so people had organs in their homes. Our tour guide demonstrated quite capably how one of the organs sounded.

On Thursday we had our church service on the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread in Winterthur with 45 people in attedance, including one couple from a French-speaking area in Switzerland. We provided a translation for them (services were conducted in German, of course). The next day Jolanda, her son Kai and I drove to Lengnau near Biel (between Basel and Bern) to visit Rose Marie Lörtscher, who had invited us to spend the night with her. We arrived in time to enjoy a beautiful view of the Swiss alps in the distance, with the sun shimmering on the snow. Rose Marie was also our host the next day for a Sabbath small group interactive Bible Study, during which English, French and German were all used to make sure everyone understood our subject. In the evening several of us were up until nearly 1 a.m. talking about "old times" in the church and recent developments in the greater church of God community.

The next day, Sunday, was time for me to return to Bonn. In Basel there was a delay because the train from Berlin had not arrived. It seems the night before some drunk had driven his car onto the train tracks between Frankfurt and Mannheim, causing a wreck with a high-speed ICE train. So trains were again diverted around the damaged tracks. But I made it home in the evening after a delightful trip.