Europe Trip, Part II: The Swiss Alps

One of the biggest highlights of the trip was our time in the Swiss Alps.  I had heard how beautiful they were, and as profuse as everyone's descriptions were, they still did not do the Alps justice.  Unfortunately, our pictures don't do the scenery justice, either, but we'll post them anyways.

The first day we drove from Zurich to Lauterbrunnen.  Most of the drive was through the lowlands, then all of a sudden, I drove over a small crest that opened onto Lake Thun.  The lake's color was a stunning shade of jade.  The lake was surrounded on three sides by enormous, green mountains, the Alps in the distant background on two of the sides.  Interspersed around lake were pockets of little villages with old churches, castles, and houses in a medieval and Tudor style.  Seriously, the scene looked like something out a Disney movie.  I was so impressed, that I tapped on Heather until she awoke to enjoy it with me.

Lauterbrunnen is situated in a valley near the tallest points in Europe, which are the three peaks of Jongfrau, Monch, and Eiger.  Here's a view from the village's entrance.  You can kinda see the peaks on the left.

From Lauterbrunnen, we took a gondola up to Murren to get an even better view of the valley and the peaks.  We could have taken another gondola up to a really tall peak, but it cost about US $77 for one person, which was simply not worth it.  However, the other tall peak is where they filmed the first James Bond movie.  Too bad we missed it.  Here's a pic of us with the mountains in the background.

From Murren, we could either take a train or hike to the next mountainside village.  Easy choice: we didn't come to the Alps to take trains!
So we hiked for about 1 hour, constantly amazed by our surrounding.

We stopped off for a while at a playground.  One thing we loved about Switzerland is that there are amazing hiking trails all over the place.  And all along these trails are playgrounds and drinking fountains.  The trails are amazingly well maintained and great for kids.

As we approached the next mountain village, we heard all sorts of musical noises.  First was a soft chorus of cow bells.  Cows were grazing all along the mountain side, and on each cow was a massive cow bell.  The next sound we heard was a soft, heavenly trumpet like sound.  As we got near the village, the sound grew louder.  Apparently there was a group of alp horn players up on the moutain side.  The as we walked on a bit further into a tiny village, a woman came out from behind her house carrying a massive alp horn.  Elli was fascinated and so the woman actually stopped and asked us if we would like her to play for us.  We readily agreed and got our own alp performance just for our little family!  She played a beautiful little melody, and we were all hypnotized by it.  Nearby was a group of five older people who were also practicing their alp horns.  We could not have timed our visit to this place better.  If what I'm describing (the scenery, the music all throughout the mountainside) seems like a dream, too good to be true, that is how I felt, too, while it was happening.  It was awesome!

From the heavenly mountainside village, as I like to refer to it, we took a funicular up the mountainside, through a mountain tunnel, all the way to Allumendhubel.  For those of you who don't know what a funicular is, it is a train that goes straight up the side of a mountain.  They're also known as cliff railways.  We have a few pics of another funicular later on, so stay tuned.
At Allumendhubel, again we found another playground and long alpine slide.  From there, we hiked about 2 hours down the mountain along my favorite trails of all the trails we hiked called the children's adventure trail.   The views were spectacular.  And halfway down, we came across this little area designed for kids with a zipline and all sorts of other fun things.

Elli was not only an AMAZING hiker (she hiked the entire 2 hours down the mountainside, with very minimal complaining, not wanting to ride in the hiking backpack), but she was also FEARLESS.  She went down the huge slides without any hesitation and she was all over the zipline.  She LOVED it!  At one point, Heather even let her try it on her own, against my better judgement.  Aren't fathers the ones who are supposed to be more reckless with their kids' lives?  In this instance, it was all Heather throwing caution to the wind.  Scary thing is, when Elli hit the end of the zipline, it almost bucked her right off.  Scared the daylights out of me.   Thankfully, Elli is one tough kid.  Hope she survives her childhood!

Up close and personal with a wild alipine bovine.

Taking the gondola back down to the valley floor after a magical afternoon of hiking through the Alps. Quite breathtaking in itself!

That night, rather than drive the 3 or so hours back to Zurich, we decided to go camping.  Why not?!  We're in the Alps, after all.  So we set up three tents, had a picnic style dinner complete with s'mores (which is SO much tastier with Swiss chocolate), and spent the night.  It was the first time in quite a while that I had seen so many stars out at night.  Taipei is not a great place for star-gazing.  Incredibly, we all slept wonderfully that night, and the girls slept in longer than they had all week! 

The next morning, we visited the largest underground waterfall in all of Europe, Trummelbach Falls.  Apparently, the ice melt from the glaciers on top of Jongfrau have eventually carved out a little pathway through the middle of the mountain down to the valley floor.  Due to the loudness of the rushing waters, babies under the age of 3 or so are not allowed on this hike.  But Elli came along.  

After Tremmelbach, we drove a short distance to the steepest funicular in all of Switzerland, Gelmerbahn.  The ride up was a bit scary at the steepest point, but it was a great ride.   

 

At the top of the funicular was a beautiful, jade colored lake surrounded by mountains.  Seriously, we could not get sick of seeing this scenery.  It was awesome!  Instead of taking the train back down, we decided to brave the three hour hike.  First we skirted around the lake, stopping to skip rocks, enjoy some chocolate (which we did often all throughout our trip), and take in the views.  It was another great hike, especially since both our girls fell asleep for a while in the backpacks.

To finish off our two days of Alpine amazingness, we took one more adventurous hike through Aare Gorge.   The gorge starts off fairly wide then narrows dramatically in the middle.  Right before it narrows, there are weird, man-made holes cut into the base of the opposite gorge wall.  A sign in the middle of the hike explains that those holes are part of a system of tunnels dug out in the mountain during WWII to served as a backup storage area and refuge for soldiers.  The tunnels apparently had a gym and cafeteria area along with bunkers.  Too bad we couldn't see it.  But the hike itself was still very fun.

Part 3 to come...

Europe Trip, Part I: Castles, Stain Glass, and Macaques

As many of you know, Heather, the girls, and I recently took a long trip to visit our good friends Jeremy and Rochelle in Switzerland.  The government paid for our plane tickets (as they do for all the diplomats here in Taiwan), and we covered the rest.  We spend almost three weeks touring all over Switzerland as well as parts of southern Germany, a quick stop in France, and a few days in Prague.  The trip was amazing.

No way we'll be able to cover everything in one blog, so we're going to break it up into several posts, starting with this one.

LENZBERG
After traveling for almost 24 hours with two very tired and sleep-deprived kids, we decided to take the first day in Switzerland easy.  So we went to a to a nearby castle called Lenzberg.

 Lenzberg was a great castle with many floors and rooms that we could look through.  Each room was filled with items from different periods of the castle's existence.  There were also videos in many of the rooms showing how people would use the room.   Legend has it that the whole castle was built on top of a rock outcrop on top of a hill that was originally a dragon's lair.  They even had a recorded shadow puppet show showing the legend.  The girls loved it.  One unique thing about the castle was that many rooms had little holographic movie experiences.  For example, on the table below, food and hands would appear and recorded voices would reenact a little story of people having dinner during that time in history.

The top floor of the castle was an enormous play area where kids could do castle-related crafts, dress up in princess clothes and jewelry, play with toy castles, etc. They even had dress-up clothes for adults which Heather and I may or may not have taken advantage of!  The girls could have spent hours playing in there - they are our little princesses after all.

ZURICH
After the castle, we drove into Zurich, which seemed to be a surprisingly small city for one of Switzerland's major cities.  It is a beautiful city: clean, organized, lots of small alleys, a river dividing the city by two.   We loved that even in their biggest city, there were no high rises ruining the horizon.

Sienna and Rochelle's daughter Liza had a good time playing together during a half-day tour.

The main attractions in Zurich are two churches: Fraumunster and Grossmunster.  Fraumunster's claim to fame is its stain glass windows designed by Marc Chagall.  There are five windows altogether lining the walls of the abbey.  The windows are all vibrantly colored and very beautiful.  Pictures are not allowed inside, so here's the best picture I could find of the windows online.

Grossmunster also had some very unique stain glassed windows.  Here are some pics below.

EGUISHEIM 

The next day, we traveled to a small town in northeast France in Alsace called Eguisheim, which is a quaint little medieval town chalked full of old, well preserved buildings.   We were surprised at how much we loved this little town.  We walked around and poked our heads into various buildings, shops, and stores.  Heather was so happy to have a great lunch of warmed goat cheese, bruschetta, and a crisp salad; she was in heaven!

MONKEY MOUNTAIN

Near Eguisheim is an area that Rochelle and Jeremy call Monkey Monkey.  It's located on the top of a hill.  It's a large park full of macaque monkeys all in this fenced in area.  They give you popcorn at the park entrance to feed the monkeys with.  The girls weren't timid at all in getting right up close and personal with the monkeys.  Even Sienna was got right up close to them, enough to make us a bit nervous!