Wednesday, Waterfall Day

 After my morning coffee, I headed out on a short walk to find a spot to watch the sunrise. There were a few other people out walking as well.

 

The funicular that Nathan and I went on yesterday.

Our hotel is to the left, the Jungfrau.

We headed down for breakfast at 7 am. Delicious.  We decided that we wanted to get moving to get up to the Schilthorn.  A Funifor cable car got us to Birg. Then another cable car took us to Schilthorn. 

This is where the Piz Gloria is, it is a revolving restaurant which is in the James Bond movie "On Her Majesty's Secret Service".  

It is a nice restaurant.  It was fun watching the scene change.

You have to make a reservation way ahead if you want to eat a meal there.  We were there early and were just having hot chocolate, so we got seated right away. 

Gorgeous views but I was a little disappointed with the hot chocolate. At least it wasn't a packet of Swiss Miss.

Nathan 007

We then wandered around a little 

Nathan was scaring me.  He said that there was only about 1 1-foot drop, but that wasn't what it looked like.

We took the cable car down to the midpoint, Birg, so that we could do the thrill walk and the skywalk.  

The clear plastic part was blocked off, with only a small portion available to stand on.  Notice the crack on the side.  That may be why it is closed off.

We headed on down the rest of the way on the Funifor cable car. "A Funifor is a cable car system featuring a pair of carrier cables running parallet to each other, the distance between them being almost the same or greater than the width of the cable car cabin." 

We saw a bunch of paragliders, one after another.  Cathy, of our group, went paragliding today.  She had a great time.

We started the Lauterbrunnen Valley Walk to check out some different waterfalls.

Staubach Falls

This stream was very full.  It would be quite the thrilling white water experience. I heard that it is very dangerous because of the debris & rocks in the water.

We walked along beside it for a while.  Very nice path.  We ended out walking quite a long way on the street.  It was hot. It would have been nice to stay on the wooded path, but Google said that there weren't any other bridges.  We found out later that there had been another bridge.

We were heading towards Trummelbach Falls. This is the only glacier-fed underground waterfall in Europe that is accessible to people.  There are 10 falls.  There was a funicular that took us up.  This reduced the amount of stair climbing.

Naturally my pictures did not do it justice. But here are some anyway.  My videos show it better, but I can't put those on this blog from here.

That was the best!! So Awesome.

Alpenroses, are in the Rhododendron family.

After seeing all 10 of the falls, we went for lunch.  It was cool in the tunnels, so I did use my jacket.  But otherwise, it was a pain carrying my jacket around.

Aperol spritz and a tuna salad sandwich at the Trummelbach Cafe.

We took the bus to Lauterbrunnen.

We went for one more waterfall, Mürrenbach Falls.

When I saw the hill I would have to go up, I got discouraged.  So Nathan went on, and I sat in the shade.  I sat next to a woman whose husband had gone up to the falls.

He could almost go behind the falls

He is at the top of the hill, coming down.

 Then we got on a cable car to Grutschalp and from there we got a small train to Mürren.

When we got back to the hotel, Nathan and I changed rooms.  He kept bumping his head on the eaves and the bathroom door.

We took a little break and then headed out to the Gondola bar. It really is a converted gondola.

 We were meeting up with Cathy & Jim so that she could show us pictures of her paragliding experience.  There we found others from our group.  We sat and chatted.

Nathan and I, each had a Hugo.

Later Nathan had a Mojito.

We taught some people how to play Peek. First, it was just Jim, then Hank and Maureen joined us.

Cat on a hot tin roof ... Well, maybe it isn't tin.

This one didn't pose at the top.

When we got back to the room, my laundry had been returned in this cute basket.

At 6:30 pm, we headed out to dinner at the Alpina.  Most of the restaurants in town are connected with a hotel.

We chose it because they had raclettes.  This was our second attempt.

Nice view

Wine and salad

Very unusual raclettes.  Potatoes, pickles, tomatoes, and pickled onions in a bed of melted cheese.  The part that was surprising was the way the cheese was presented.  I think that the Rosti we had last night was better.

It was threatening to rain again.  This time it just sprinkled, but had stopped by the time we were through with dinner.  

Fabulous view of a rainbow.

It is faint, but it was a complete rainbow

The other end.

What a full day.  8.4 miles today. It was another hot day while we were hiking, but at least there were some cool times.  It cools down at night in Mürren.