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One-A-Days
Entry 23 of 54 | show all | print this entry |
After Liechtenstein, we burned through Switzerland visiting a city each day. First we saw Lucerne. Oh Lucerne. One of the MOST beautiful places so far. I could of just ended the trip there and never left. The medieval city was situated along a river that emptied out into a huge lake. The sky line was dominated with the Alps in background, green rolling hills, and a tropical blue-green lake. I have never seen lake water so magnificent before. The color just made you want to jump in, maybe even frolic in. We walked from our hostel along the lake to reach the Transportation museum. This museum was AWESOME. It had sections on planes, trains, and spacecrafts. You could also ride razor scooters from one exhibit to the other. We spent most of our time in the aerospace area, naturally, but came too late to visit the planetarium. We were able to go on the 360 degree rotating flight simulator. Needless to say I made Braden a little queasy with my fancy/crazy flying. We only had an hour and a half in there because we arrived too late, but could of easily spent way more. We then set out to see some of the medieval old town. There are two old bridges that stretch diagonally across the river, more or less the longest way possible to cross the river. Apparently they did not understand the whole shortest distance between two points is a straight line thing. The bridges were really pretty and made out of wood, complete with bible stories painted in the rafters. The second bridge had some different stories that included multiple skeletons and a little chapel dedicated for the virgin mary...We settled into a little restaurant on the river edge for dinner and enjoyed the swans that swam by us as we ate. I had pretty much the best french fries I have ever had at this little place, no joke, best ever. On our way back to the hostel we tried to stop and see a monument for all the fallen soldiers who died in some ancient war. It was suppose to be a lion carved from the side of a cliff mourning the death of these soldiers. We found it but it was not lit up at night so we could not see a darn thing. We were able to find a postcard of it to actually know what it looked like, and it was a remarkable sculpture. The lion was so sad. We went back to the hostel for another quiet night in.
The next day it was off to Grindelwald. This is a little mountain town in the alps above Interlaken. There is only one hostel there and it is this beautiful little chalet that has the most breath taking views. I literally sat on the balcony of our hostel staring out for an hour. We intended to take a train ride up to the "Top of Europe" but it cost 150 bucks and we would only have an hour up there to explore. So we settled for taking a gondola to First. This was a 30 min ride up. We hiked around for a couple hours, unable to keep our jaws shut due to the spectacular view. Green mountains with streams trickling down them backed by snow covered Alps. There were hundreds of cows grazing around us all with bells around their necks so there was a thunderous sound of ringing. Braden wanted to approach and pet a cow. I gave the advice that approaching something 5 times your body mass is never a good thing. He insisted he could get a way from it fast enough until I reminded him what a stampede was. We had a real fun time hiking around, but had to make it back to the last gondola otherwise it would of been a 3 hour hike down. We made it back to our hostel for dinner and enjoyed a relaxing time admiring the view. The moon that night was the fullest I've ever seen it. It was perfectly centered between two mountain peaks and the clouds were passing over it creating actual rays of moon light. We couldn't of asked for a more perfect night.
The next morning we headed off to Zermatt. This is another small mountain town a little farther south that has a private and expensive train ruining to it. This town was really cool though because there were no cars allowed. Anyone who lived there had little electric carts. Since Zermatt is a prime skiing location, there are many fancy hotels about and they all have little carts that shuttle people to and from the train station. We arrived in the afternoon to find half the people waking around in ski cloths holding either snow shoes or skis. After checking to see that it was still August, we learned that Zermatt has the best year around skiing. And the best part about it was you could ski around the Matterhorn. Yes, the Matterhorn. We saw it in most of its glory. The clouds were out and covering the tip, but still awesome even though Mickey wasn't climbing it hourly. We were getting pretty tired will all the rapid traveling we were doing so we decided to have a day of rest. This consisted of walking around the cute little mountain town walking into the many stores. We also went jeans shopping for Braden because he didn't pack any and really wanted to wear them. He ended up buying Wranglers in Zermatt Switzerland. We had a nice little dinner in town and then walked back up to the hostel after sun down. We ended up staying in because of the rain that has started, and we found an interesting couple to chat with. They both went to Oregon State in Eugene, but one was from California. So we ended up talking with them for hours until we went to bed. They were staying in Interlaken the next night and we were going to Geneva so we parted ways in the morning.
We made it to Geneva in the evening because it was a long train. It was interesting going to the edge of the country as seeing how the language changed. The train stops went from being read in German, English and French to French and sometimes German. We got there also in the pouring rain. This didn't give us the ability to wander around and see the city. We attempted to see the lake for a little bit, but just got completely drenched. Coincidentally I had a family friend who lived 20 minutes outside of the city in a little town called Feschy. Krista and her husband Florent live is the most beautiful little town. They have little old house full of character that is surrounded by hills of vineyards. They both work in the wine industry so it was really interesting to hear about the local wine. They had us over for a traditional Swiss dinner of fondue, and had a bottle of the local wine. It was the best white wine I have ever had, and thats saying a lot since I don't really like white wine. It was so nice to escape the rain and have a lovely dinner with lovely people. Braden and I had such a good time that we were sad to go back to Geneva. But we had too, and the next morning the rain had subsided. We decided to get to Bern a little later than planned so we could visit the United Nations building in Geneva. It was such a cool building because the main part was built in the 20s for the League of Nations which the UN took over after WWII. The architecture is that beautiful art deco, that I couldn't stop taking pictures of. Thankfully we could take pictures in the buildings. We were able to get a little history of the UN and see two meeting rooms and the council chambers. All the art on the walls is a present from one of the countries in the UN. It is customary for a country to give a gift of art when they join. This makes for a very interesting art collection. After getting stuffed full of UN knowledge, we left to catch a train to Bern.
Bern is the capitol of Switzerland and is a relatively small capitol. It is comprised mostly of an old medieval like town surrounded by an old city wall and a river. All the buildings had some historical significance, but we couldn't see most of these building because there was soooo much construction going on. Everything had covered scaffolding on it and most of the main roads were dug up. We were able to see the bears though. Now the city of Bern was founded by some important guy who had a bear for his mascot, therefore the bear is the crest of the city. They gone even farther than that, they have two live bears in a zoo like environment on the edge of the city. We went and watched these bears walk back and forth between food dishes and then moved back towards the city center. We went into the center of town where the construction was the greatest and found a square surrounded by stadium seating. We approached the stands thinking it was some form of live music, but we were very wrong. It turned out to be a beach volleyball tournament. Yes, a BEACH volleyball tourney in the middle of a medieval town in a land locked country. Well, of course we sat down and watched. There was a guys match and a girls match we ended up watching. We have no idea who they were or why there was a tournament there because all the info was in German. But they played some really awesome music that was popular in the US about 15 years ago. Since Braden was starving and I couldn't force him to watch another match, we went and had a nice little Italian dinner close to the square. After that I though I would appease Braden by going to a local gay bar with him. We went out so early that the bars were dead and the two bars we went to the bartenders thought we wandered in not knowing it was a gay bar. But we had a fun time eventually hitting the bar below our hostel where everyone seemed to be. There was a huge age range and they started playing 'its raining men' as soon as we entered the bar. We had a drink and people watched until we needed to go to bed. We had a long trip to Germany were we needed to pick Chris up from the airport.
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