Hotel Steinbock Lauterbrunnen

... br>Deze hebben we eerder tervergeefs getracht te beklimmen in 2004 én 2007. <br>Helaas ook deze keer zijn we op de helft gestrand... <br>We hadden reeds 4uur omhoog geklommen van 1620 naar 2050 meter hoogte! Volgens de bordjes zouden we hier echter 2uur over moeten doen; Door de sneeuw was dit voor ons niet mogelijk.<br>Eerst was de sneeuw nog leuk maar na dat hij tot de schenen en vervolgens tot de knieen was het bijna niet meer te doen ...

... zig-zag. Stones called schindles sit like heavy checkers on old rooftops, awaiting nature's next move. These stones protect the slate from the violent winter winds. Gimmelwald's biggest building is the school in which 2 teachers share one job. There's nothing but air between Gimmelwald and the rock face of the Jungfrau a mile or two across. Kick a soccer ball wrong and it ends up a mile below on the Lauterbrunnen Valley floor. Gimmelwald ...

... with mattresses, and they let couch surfers stay up there. It was dark and eerie, but pretty hilarious. And definitely not something I would normally do, so it was cool to be out of my element and just let things come as they may. After we dropped our stuff off and had a few laughs about our living conditions we hit the road. We also had to wait around for one of our friends who, due to silly girl drama, decided to get to Interlaken two hours ...

I'm here in Interlaken and loving it :) This'll be a shorter, unedited summary of the past couple days...sorry for any spelling/grammar errors! We arrived late at night on Wednesday after spending a long cold night in a small London airport. We had been hoping to head into London to see the sights at night during our 14 hour layover, but the airport turned out to be 25 miles outside of London.. So we flew into Zurich and spent the ...

... van hurt her nostrils..eeek!<br>After deicing and all the rest we headed to Lucern.. or so we thought. Honeydew made her record amount of noise so far. I have never heard a van or car rev so hard in my life. When I went to park (stopped off at the wonderful coffee shop there - she does amazing coffees and learnt the skill in NZ!) I had to keep going as the amount of noise when she wasn't in gear. It was like 5 aeroplanes landing! OH MY GOD.......<br>

... there were a few people who though it was pretty funny that I went all the way to Switzerland to hike in the Alps and have never done the same in the Rockies. Looks like I have some hiking to do when I get back home. <br><br>The pictures will do a much better job of telling the story than my words.<br><br>Also, this is the first place in my entire trip where I did not meet a single Australian. Whats up?

... and another day of biking around the entire city, we set off at midnight to drive on the Autobahn to Bern. So instead of spending the night on a sleeping train, we took turns driving and sleeping (thank you Alex for the wonderful neck pillow!). <br><br><br><br>We drove into Interlaken around 9, into GORGEOUS views of mountains and lakes (thanks Jess!!). Because we were pooped from almost no sleep, we spent most of the day sleeping ...

Well, we did make it to the campsite before dark&#8230;maybe not early evening but enough to cook dinner by natural light :) This campsite is the most amazing place I think I have ever seen&#8230;we are in the middle of the Swiss Alps in a town called Lauterbrunnen and there are huge mountains all around us. Fred backs onto a river so we slept without earplugs for the first night and listed to the sound of the river flowing instead! There are waterfalls down the sides ...

Today we drove from Lauterbrunnen to some small town in Bavaria.<br> We were headed for Neuschwanstein, the famous castle of Mad King Ludwig.<br> In the morning we marveled at the place where we had camped for the last few days. With all of our hiking and train riding, we had had very little chance to admire it. Huge vertical walls of rock towered above us on both sides. The valley in which were camped was at the bottom of a sort of ...

... the steepest train trip I have ever been on. When the train left the station, it started to climb immediatly. It got seriously steep and stayed that way. I don't know what the percentage of the grade was, but I was pressed back in my seat by the steepness. The rail was cogged, as no train could have climbed such a grade on tracks alone. We climbed through tunnels and ever higher. By the time we made it to Kleine Scheidegg 45 minutes later ...