Departing on June 12th from San Francisco, Boen and I arrived at the airport with our Co-Motion tandem split into two Trico-Ironcase bike boxes, an ebags roller luggage, and the ebags backpack carry on. At the checkin counter, despite my having weighed the boxes at home before, the scaled showed that we were one pound overweight. We unboxed that case and took out two tools: the S&S coupler tool and the BB adjustment tool onto our carryon. With that, we were at 51 pounds, which is within the 23kg limit for the bike counting as one piece of luggage according to United’s rules. That wasn’t the end of the snafu, however, as at the TSA checkpoint, the security agents declared that the BB tool was simply too big to allow in a carryon. It wasn’t worth the checked bag fee, so we let them confiscate it. The S&S coupler tool, fortunately was deemed small enough.
Arriving in Zurich early around 10:50am after several delays, we made through passport controls and collected our bike boxes safely and made the 11:30am airport shuttle to the Zurich Airport Hilton, our new standby for flying with bikes ever since the Novotel Airport hotel charged us $400 to hold our bike boxes for 2 weeks! The checkin at the hotel and the bike assembly went well, but the bike wouldn’t hold the middle gears, which meant something was wrong.
I knew better than to try to debug a problem like this while jet-lagged, so I asked a hotel employee for a good bike shop in the direction of Zurich, and then we pedaled off with one pannier for daily needs. Arriving at the bike shop it wasn’t open for 10 minutes since they closed for lunch. I tried in vain to debug the shifting problem, and when the shop opened they looked at it and immediately diagnosed it as a bent chainring! 
I asked if they had a replacement narrow-wide chainring. “Not in 130 BCD!” they declared, since it’s rare in Europe that anyone with a road bike would conceivably go 1x. Instead, they proceeded to get out a rubber mallet and a pair of pliers and bent the ring back in shape, something I wouldn’t even have the confidence to do even if I wasn’t jet-lagged. They took the opportunity to criticize the shifting setup, and then proceeded to remove the rear derailleur, readjust all the stop screws, and replace it and test all the shifting. I was impressed. I was even more grateful when I tried to pay them and they waved us off!
I’d made an appointment at the Sprungli/Lindt Home of Chocolate tour for 3:30pm. It was only a 10 mile ride, but of course in my jet-lagged state everything took longer. Arriving half an hour early, we locked up our bike and marvelled at the huge chocolate fountain. Being told that because of the large number of visitors they weren’t going to let us in half an hour early despite the implications of the instructions on the ticket. When we got in, we found the display was well done, and the chocolate tasting section of the tour so good (and pretty much unlimited!) that the amount of chocolate a healthy 9-year-old can eat would more than pay for itself on the tour. There were exhibits and explanations about every part of the process, from the tree planting, harvesting, to processing, manufacturing, and the history of the process and of course, the advertising and marketing of Switzerland and its association with chocolate.
After the tour, we rode back to the hotel, this time stopping at the Coop supermarket to buy dinner and breakfast. I counted on the jet-lag to get us up the next morning early enough to catch the first train to Meiringen, which meant that it was not worth paying for the hotel’s breakfast. The forecast for the next couple of days were abysmal, but forecasts have a tendency to be pessimistic.
Agonizing about the decision to pay for a half-tax card, I decided in favor of it simply because it meant that Boen’s tickets would be free. I figured that if the forecast was as bad as it was slated to be during our stay at Rosenlaui, we would use the half tax card to travel to the Swiss Caves which I had never been and that involved 2 train trips and 2 bus transfers.
I took a melatonin pill and went to bed at 8:30pm. Throughout the trip I would synchronize to Boen’s bed time. It’s generally easier to get a kid to adhere to an early bedtime if the parent also goes along with it.
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