When my parents last came over to Europe in 2015, we'd gone on a family trip to Basel and some early ideas which we considered, but rejected because they were too costly and also would take a lot of time to get to and from. Among these ideas was to go up the Jungfrau, where the train goes inside the mountain up to what's called "The Top of Europe", but also was an idea to visit Liechenstein, for no other reason than it was another country to visit - but we had no idea whether it was even worth visiting or what there was to do there. Sasha and I had done a mind map listing all the countries we still wanted to visit or visit again, and what we wanted to do there. On this list, Sasha had put Liechtenstein (and Luxembourg, which *technically* we've already been to) because it was yet another country in Europe and not one many people tend to go visit. Liechtenstein is really tiny and borders Switzerland and Austria - and in doing a paper study one day trying to incorporate a number of Swiss things I wanted to do, I found that it would be possible to visit Liechtenstein quite easily in the course of this. This added impetus for a trip but kind of helped formalize the plans - in order to get from the Jungfrau to Liechtenstein, it made sense to cut through the Swiss Alps and it just so happened Switzerland's "Premier" tourist train The Glacier Express travelled that section. It would also allow the possibility of doing the Bernina Express, the less famous but apparently more scenic train journey through the Alps.
It also became pretty apparent that it made no sense to do these things in stages over the course of a few weekend trips - some of them were a bit difficult to get to from major entry points, but were readily accessible from one thing to the next so really it all had to be done in one trip. We figured on 4 days, and built up a plan together that built on the paper study I had originally done but changed things around to suit. When going through everything and using Zurich as the logical departure point Sasha asked how much time we would have there. Not a lot was my reply, besides there's not much to do there. Was I sure about that I was asked. Mostly, but not 100%. Sasha wanted to see Zurich for herself, and the only way to meaningfully do that was to add an extra day - so the trip now was 5 days. We were going in February in the hope that we would see snow on the Alps but even if there was none, it should be pretty scenic. This trip would not be cheap either - Switzerland never is, but all the stuff we were doing was not altogether cheap either. However if we were to do this, we might as well do it properly, right?
With the outline decided upon, everything researched and then booked, we were going.
Day 0 - Travelling to Zurich
Day 1 - Top of Europe
Day 2 - Through the Alps
Day 3 - More Trains, More Alps
Day 4 - Another Day, Another Country
Day 5 - Finding things to do in Zürich
In Summary
We could have just got cheap airfares to a city, spent a weekend there (Basel? Geneva?) and called Switzerland done for Sasha - but we would have missed out on so much, especially stuff that we both wanted to do. This was a pretty comprehensive trip through Switzerland no matter which way you look at it, and I don't imagine there will be much cause to specifically visit Switzerland again for us during our time over this side of the world. That's not to say we won't - it could well be that we transit Switzerland in the course of other travels, but we won't be making a point of it as we have plenty of other places left on our list. In the far future though, I could see the country being a target for a revisit - that alpine scenery will never get old...