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Buus and Laufelfingen, Switzerland (Schweig): We arrived in Southampton on Thursday, April 17, but instead of staying aboard and sailing back to New York City, we chose to say good-bye to QE2, allowing us to complete some unfinished business in Europe. (We’d now been aboard ship for 3 ½ months and they don’t change the scenery between Southampton and NYC.) We took a train from Southampton to London, another through the Chunnel to Paris and yet another to Basel, Switzerland. From Basel we took local trains and buses to visit Buus, the ancestral home of the Boozers, spelled Buser in Switzerland, meaning from the town of Buus. In all of our travels, nothing equals Buus for quaintness and beauty. It is an idyllic pastoral village of 900 in the rolling hills of Switzerland, truly a picture post card from the past. Every house, barn and water trough is beautifully preserved and flowers bloom everywhere. High above the town sits the cemetery and church, whose tall steeple is topped with a gold chanticleer that faithfully keeps watch over Buus and its vineyards. We then traveled to Laufelfingen through hillsides of blooming cherry trees like handfuls of popcorn strewn over the green grass of Spring. (Laufelfingen is the town from which the Boozers (Busers) departed in 1736 to go to the New World.) Laufelfingen also has a church on a hill overlooking the town, with an immaculately kept cemetery ablaze with pansies, tulips and daffodils. Laufelfingen is lovely, but being more a 20th century manufacturing town, lacks the idyllic storybook charm of Buus. Public transportation in rural Switzerland is phenomenal! We do not speak Swiss-German, however armed with a train-bus schedule, we maneuvered this remarkable system with ease. That is train and bus to Buus, bus and two separate trains to Laufelfingen and two separate trains back to Basel. Each smooth, fast and on time, to the minute! How would you like to be in a country where there are clocks on almost every building and each is displaying the correct time!
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