We stayed in the resort town of Murren in the Berner Oberland. It is a car free town on the side of the mountain that you take a cable car or train to. Here she is:
We jumped in with a hike on the North Face Trail to Gimmelwald.
This is a pic of Adam the gentle giant:
A mountain chalet on the hike:
Low and behold, what did we find in Gimmelwald? Rick Steves was going to be there! Alas, he was not there at that moment, but we thought this sign was funny. He's our guidebook hero.
We took a cable car back to Murren for the town parade in the afternoon. It started with these cows!
See those huge bells around their necks? And the flowers strapped to their heads?
The parade started with cow bells and ended with cow bells... But the cows were replaced with men at the end. They were ringing their bells in unison as they filed down the street. Those bells looked really heavy.
After the parade, we rode a cable car up to the Schilthorn. There is a revolving restaurant at the top where the James Bond movie On Her Majesty's Secret Service was set. (It's an old one... 1969 in case you were wondering.)
The next day we hiked to Trummelbach Falls. The water here is clear! Here are a couple of views along the way. The water is all glacier melt from the mountains.
Here is a pic of the falls. Trummelbach is a series of 10 glacier-waterfalls that are inside a mountain. We had to take an elevator part of the way up before climbing stairs in and out of caves. The water is the melt from the Eiger, Monch, and Jungfrau mountains and our guidebook said it falls at a rate of 5,200 gallons a second!
After the falls, we had lunch down in the Lauterbrunnen Valley where it started to pour rain. The rain did not stop all afternoon and continued into the evening. This was the view from our room (which normally showed the mountains):
We couldn't see a thing! So, we ended up relaxing in the room catching up on the Olympics. Which was kind of funny because all of the coverage was in German. We really missed the in depth coverage and special athlete profiles you get here in the States. Anyways... we were supposed to leave for Lucerne the next morning, but since we missed half a day due to weather, we decided to take the late afternoon train instead. We ended up doing a hike on the Jungfrau side of the valley from Mannlichen to Kleine Scheidegg. The cows and wildflowers were the highlight.
At the end of the hike, Adam made me take this picture with the fake cows. I was not excited, obviously.
This picture is straight out of a Rick Steve's video! Ha! We joke that is his arm sticking out of the train window.
Two more pics and then I promise to stop. This is the longest post ever.
I couldn't decide which of those two pics I liked better. The first one is from the hike and the second one is from the patio at our hotel.
Switzerland is sweet. You must get there some day. More Switzerland in the next post, but it is no longer the mountains... Lucerne awaits! :-)
No comments:
Post a Comment