A day in the Alps!

Picture with me our setting for lunch today…sitting in a hiker’s shelter along a trail in the Alps. Our menu? Swiss cheese and salami sandwiches, carrot sticks, bruschetta chips, and swiss chocolate. The smell? Fresh mountain air. The sounds? A little brook to our left and from across the valley, the music of cow bells as they grazed for their lunch. The views? Wildflower-sprayed green meadows, cut by streams, dotted by cows and evergreens rising to greet the mountains and beyond the meadows…nothing. Clouds. As far as the eye could see, clouds! :)
Yesterday we decided that come rain or shine, we were going to hike in the Alps today. I’ve wanted to see the Alps since I was a little girl and we weren’t about to sit in town and not even try. So we caught a morning train up to Grindelwald and set out. We started by taking the gondola from Grindelwald up to one of the peaks, Mannlichen. It’s advertised as the world’s longest gondola track and we really enjoyed the ride up and the free Ricola drops that they handed out with the tickets :) . In Grindelwald, the bases of a few of the peaks were visible, but the gondola carried us right up into the clouds. We had planned to hike a ridge trail to one of the train stations cradled up in the mountains, but that trail was still closed due to snow. So we picked another station lower down and further away and started hiking. In the Alps! It snowed on us, hailed on us, and rained on us and it was still great! We had to watch our step pretty closely at first as the trail was alternately snowy, muddy, slippery, or a stream, but as we got below the snow line, we were able to enjoy the views of wildflowers braving that harsh environment, the unbelievable green of the high alpine meadows, the village laid out in the valley below us and occasionally, a rocky outcropping hinting at the huge mountains that stood above the clouds. I have decided that I will have to return to the Alps as many times as it takes to see them on a clear day! I can’t even begin to think how BIG the views are up there when the mountains are out. It was awe-inspiring just seeing what we could. After our lunch break, we finished the hike at Alpiglen, a little train station, and bought tickets down the mountain on the little mountain train. There’s a train that goes all the way up to one of the arms of the Jungfrau, the highest peak in the region (making it the highest train station in Europe), but tickets are around $200 (!) and it was only intermittently clear up there today, too. It was chilly up there today (around 1 degree Celsius). I had to buy a hat at the gift shop on Mannlichen (they didn’t gouge me too badly) and by the time we got down, we were ready to sit indoors and enjoy a cup of coffee.
We headed back down to Interlaken to plan our trip to Geneva tomorrow, use up our internet time at McDonald’s, enjoy dinner with Swiss wine (not at McDonald’s) and then head back to our cozy room to pack up. We’re watching Netherlands play France on TV now. Interlaken is quiet tonight because all the Dutch football fans are in Bern watching the game. Apparently a special “fan” train went out earlier today with over 2600 people on it! Just from Interlaken! And there’s still quite a bit of orange around town!
Well, I’d better get packing. We come home a week from today! Hard to believe!