Thursday in Mürren

 

Sunrise from my "new" room.  Nathan and I switched. He kept bumping his head on the eaves, which wasn't a problem for me, plus this room has better views.

Quite the feast

The cowbells are quite large. No wonder that we can hear them everywhere.

After breakfast, we decided to do the North Face trail.  So, we went up on the Allmendhubel funicular, which is close to us.    

We had heard that there were a lot of electric fences.  Nathan wanted to test it.  Yup, they are electric.

Gorgeous views 

Lots of cows all with ringing cow bells.  You can hear them all the time.

I don't know what we did, but we took a wrong turn.  It was a good thing because it started to rain and the way we took was shorter getting back than if we'd gone on the North Face trail.

We headed back to the hotel to change.

Flags from several countries.

Then we headed out again to walk down to Gimmelwald. 

Chris, my buddy

Once there, we headed back up again by the Stechelburg tram. It was still raining.

When we got off the cable car, we were ready for lunch.  We were trying to use up some time before our afternoon activity at 1 pm. 

This place was right next to the cable car stop.

Glühwein - yippee they served it even though it was not winter.

We ordered the cheese fondue.

It is for 2 people, but it is double the cost.  But it was very delicious.  It hit the spot.

We had a 1 pm appointment at Airtime.  We had to walk up the hill to the take-off location.

Waiting for instructions and for the setup.  Yup, we are going paragliding!!!

I had a great guide with Bruno.  He was informative and talkative. 

Nathan wasn't as thrilled with his guide, Jon.  The instructions weren't very clear, plus Jon was not a very good photographer, except that his videos were good.  But in any case, the scenery was great.  

What a fabulous experience for me.  It has always been on my bucket list.  I've done it now.  Very fun, but I don't feel the need to do it again.  This was the perfect place. They took a bunch of pictures, which I opted to buy.

Whew.  Now on to the rest of our day.  It was a challenge to figure out what we could do.  Nathan is great at figuring out logistics.  I just follow where he says to go.  We were already in the valley, so we took the bus to Lauterbrunnen and then a train to Wengen on the other side of the valley, and then another cable car up to the mountain peak. 

For 5 Swiss Francs more, we could have had the Royal Seating on the cable car.

That is on top of the cable car with just a railing.  That would have been fun. 

As usual, the scenery was stunning.  It was inspiring just being there.  Unfortunately, the pictures never do it justice. 

I guess the rows are to help the snow stay in place and reduce avalanches. 

Nathan went to the top of that peak.  I stayed down.  It took him about 20 minutes. 

There is a fun park at the cable car stop.  I think that they do a good job of placing parks/playgrounds around places where you have to wait for cable cars, trains, or buses.

Cow-shaped slide

The playground is not just for kids.

Then we walked the Kleine Scheidegg Trail. We stopped to take a lot of photos.

We got to the bottom of the trail just in time to catch the train heading back down towards Wengen. We stayed on the train all the way to Lauterbrunnen. 

We had earlier planned to do a cogwheel train, but that just didn't work out, maybe another day.

Once in Lauterbrunnen, we caught a cable car, then the train to Murren. At this point, I was pretty exhausted.  So instead of walking back to the hotel and then going out to eat, we went directly to the Eiger restaurant.  It was close to the train station.  It was the restaurant that others in our group had gone to and had recommended.

They brought bread with some flavored spreads (tuna, and curry) with the Rioja wine.

Nathan had tagliatelli with truffle sauce.

I had the Mediterranean vegetable quiche. It was served on a slate plate.

We headed back to the hotel. We went out to the patio to have some wine, which we had bought at the local Co-op earlier. I wanted to make sure that I got the pictures from the paragliding. The company had loaded them on a flash drive, and they had sent an email with a link to the photos.  As you can see, the pictures had come through.

Sunset

Another exhausting but fabulous day.  It was a lot of walking, but not strenuous.  Nathan is good about choosing routes that are mostly downhill. It was an 11.6-mile day.  We had lots of trains, buses, and cable cars as well.  It is good that tomorrow is a bus ride day. It is a day to recover.

We managed to finish the bottle of wine.