Canton: Schaffhausen

Destination: Rheinfall

Interesting thing: The Rhine Falls are the largest waterfall in Europe by volume: 487,690 litres per second at the time of writing. It’s the Niagra Falls of Europe!

Special guests: my parents

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I’ve been to the Rheinfall once before, with my in-laws almost exactly two years ago. I had hoped not to double-down on stuff but the year is marching on and there’s still many cantons to visit!

Last time we approached the Rheinfall with a long walk down down the river (nice) past a sewerage works (not so nice). This time we thought we’d go more direct and maybe check out the castle that overlooks the falls – Schloss Laufen.

Unfortunately things were not so simple. We were stymied by the fact there’s too many options for how to get to the Rheinefall! I guess because it’s quite a big, impressive attraction, there’s many ‘entry points’ and viewing stations. So we ended up catching a train to Schaffhausen station, then a bus to Neuhausen am Rheinfall and not bothering with the Schloss… Now that I look at it, the river marks the border between canton Zurich and canton Schaffhausen and the Schloss is on the Zuri side so this works out well for my writing project anyway!

We took a boat tour out to the falls, which I hadn’t done before. There’s various options, we took the shortest/easiest – the Klein Rundfart 15-minute trip – and that was really worthwhile. The flat tourist boats go quite close up to the thousands of cubic tonnes of water crashing and boiling down the falls. It seems thrillingly quite dangerous but probably isn’t. We didn’t opt to climb the rock in the middle of the flow as it seemed rather risky with a 2.5 year old.

Next time I’m gonna nail the transport and hopefully make it to the castle as well but for a first-outing with my slightly jet-lagged parents on this trip, it was a good one.