We had a theme going on during this trip of 2 nights in each town (except for Hallstatt), and then moving on to the next town. On Monday, we drove to Switzerland up over the mountains through narrow, winding, stomach-twisting roads. It was amazing to me that our big bus could even make it without running off the road (I give a lot of credit to our driver). Lauterbrunnen is a very narrow town located down in the valley - literally a river, a road, and one row of buildings on each side. (Bruce said it looked more like a gorge than a valley.) Our room at this hotel was absolutely amazing. We got one of the good rooms this time on the third floor with a large balcony that overlooked the Alps. Our balcony looked right out onto the Eiger mountain - the one featured in Clint Eastwood's 1975 movie,
The Eiger Sanction, about a mountain climber who doubles as a professional assassin. The Eiger is one of those massive, brittle, practically vertical limestone mountains you tend to visualize when you think of the Alps. It's not surprising that "Eiger" actually means "ogre" in German.
Since there wasn't much time left in the day when we arrived in Lauterbrunnen, we found our geocache and then had dinner on the hotel's restaurant patio. We both had a local specialty called "rosti," which is basically hash browns smothered in Swiss cheese. Bruce's came with a huge sausage; mine had a fried egg and a dill pickle sliced in the shape of a heart. (Alpine locals really seem to love garnishing their food with dill pickles.)
On Tuesday, I felt like we were truly went hiking in the Alps for the first time. My screaming leg muscles at the end of the day were proof. Right after breakfast, we took a gondola up to a town called Grutschalp. There are gondolas all over Lauterbrunnen, because that is the only way you can get up those steep mountains to the hiking trails.
From Grutschalp we hiked through a very green rural area. Several of the mountains have natural "ledges" carved into them about halfway up where small groups of people live.
Every so often as we were hiking along the path, we would come to a gate. The gates were set up to keep the cows from wandering all over the mountain.
After a couple hours, we arrived at a little town called Murren. Most of these little towns have only a few hundred residents - just enough to run a hotel or two and some restaurants. Murren had a banner running across the main street advertising an upcoming triathlon. It made me wonder how Courtney would feel participating in a triathlon where you had to swim in a glacier-fed lake, and then bike up and down through the mountains. From Murran we took a smaller gondola (called a funicular) up another thousand feet to a hamlet called Allmendhubel. There was a sign post pointing in different directions for several trails, but it wasn't quite clear which one we were supposed to take. Bruce the adventurer just wanted to head out, his philosophy being "how could we get lost." Seriously? We were 6,500 miles away from home in a country that mostly speaks German and the only thing I could see for miles were cows and the gondola behind us heading back down the mountain. Luckily the direction we chose turned out to be right.
This hike, without a doubt, was the most spectacular one of the trip. We saw snow-topped peaks, rugged rock faces, and grassy green slopes all under a brilliant blue sky. Our cameras just really didn't do it justice.
Most of the trail was relatively easy, but we cut off on the last 30 minutes and headed down, down, down to a little town called Gimmelwald (if you ever watch any of the Rick Steve's TV shows on PBS, Gimmelwald is one of his higlighted episodes). This last part of the trail was about as wide as my foot (I think goats used it more than humans). We practically crawled into Gimmelwald (we were so tired) and stopped for lunch as a mountainside cafe (my legs felt a little like jello at that point). It was fun, because for the next hour several pairs of our fellow travelers straggled in behind us.
We took another gondola back down to the valley. We had about another hour's worth of walking to get back to our hotel, but the path ran right along the river, so it was relatively flat. When we got back to the room, I sat on our balcony "recovering" by sipping on a local drink called
Heidi chocolate - hot chocolate laced with peppermint Schnapps.
