Switzerland and Home

On Sunday, June 17^th, we got up a little after 3 a.m., met our taxi downstairs at 3:45, and flew out on Swiss Airlines at 6:30.  After an uneventful flight we arrived at Zurich around 8:20.  We just missed the train we were going to take downtown, and the next one was canceled due to a freight train derailment, but eventually we got to Zug, where we were picked up at the station by Mary Joy’s cousin Eva.

She and her husband Andreas provided us with a nice brunch, then we went up for a pleasant hour-and-a-half walk on the Zugerberg. 

They are coming to the U.S. next year, for the first time, so we did some planning together, then Andreas cooked one of his wonderful dinners.

On Monday, June 18^th, we caught the bus down to the rail station and got on the train to Lucerne, where we changed for Interlaken.  Getting on the car with us was a group of developmentally disabled men with hiking gear to which was attached scallop shells.  It turned out that they were hiking, in stages, the part of the medieval pilgrim’s Way of Santiago that went through Switzerland.  This particular stage would go in several days from (if I remember correctly) Sachseln over the Bruenig Pass to Brienz and Interlaken.

We were picked up at the Interlaken Ost station by Eva’s 93-year-old father, Albert, who took us for lunch at the restaurant attached to the place where he lives.  Very good, and it is always nice to see Albert.

While waiting to get into our B&B in Unterseen, Sunny Days (owned by a young American woman and her German husband), we set up our hike the next day and our transportation to Basel Airport.

We wanted to go to dinner at the Goldene Anker, but they were full, so we ended up instead having sausage, roesti and a salad, with craft hard cider, on the terrace outside the Stadthaus in Unterseen, where family tradition has it that Mary Joy’s great-great-grandfather worked back in the late nineteenth century.  Not bad.  While we ate, we watched England play Tunisia in a World Cup match.

On Tuesday, June 19^th, we ate breakfast as early as possible, left our baggage at Sunny Days and walked to the Interlaken West station, where we caught a train to Interlaken Ost.  There we got on another train, being sure to board the part that went to Lauterbrunnen rather than to Grindelwald.  The train split at Zweiluetschinen, and not long thereafter we got off at the end of the line, Lauterbrunnen.  There we caught the train going up to Kleine Scheidegg, along with hordes of people going to catch the Jungfraubahn to the Jungfraujoch.  But we got off at Wengen, where we walked through the village to the cable car station, where we took the short ride up to Maennlichen.

The weather was perfect: I didn’t need the sweater I had brought.  So we headed off on the trail to Kleine Scheidegg.  This is a walk we had taken innumerable times (well, four or five times).  We wanted something that we could do in a few hours, in time to get back to Interlaken for lunch, then take the 4:05 train to Basel.  It takes no more than an hour to get to Maennlichen, an hour-and-a-half to walk, and another hour to get back to Interlaken.  We had started early enough that we figured to get back around 1:30, and our calculations turned out to be correct.

This walk is easy, but not too easy; short, but not too short; and the scenery is some of the most spectacular on earth.   You start out heading directly toward the infamous North Face of the Eiger, where, according to Wikipedia, at least 65 climbers have died since 1935.  This Ogre (what “Eiger” means in German), with its huge, pointed head, sunken eyes and crooked grin, looks like it’s waiting for you to march into its mouth.  Eventually, you reach a corner and suddenly to the right appears the Moench (“Monk”), its arm restraining the voracious Ogre from attacking the Jungfrau (“Maiden”), though she, taller and larger than the others, seems perfectly capable of defending herself.  It is all absolutely glorious, and you have to be there, like at the Grand Canyon, in order to fully experience it.

Then, down below, the railroad comes into view, along with the station and hotel complex of Kleine Scheidegg, and the Jungfraubahn trains coming and going up through the Eiger to the Jungfraujoch, the self-declared “Top of Europe,” on the 11,000-foot-high saddle between the Moench and the Jungfrau.  After some more walking, you come to civilization, the restaurant terrace of Grindelwaldblick, where we had coffee and the Swiss equivalent of apple pie.  From there, it is only a ten minute walk down the hill to the madhouse comings and goings at Kleine Scheidegg, with trains arriving and leaving in three directions.  For some reason, the first thing that meets you there is a huge Plains Indian teepee, with the Coca-Cola logo on it.

Since it didn’t matter as far as time was concerned, we took the train for Grindelwald, instead of the one back to Lauterbrunnen: trains from both villages to Interlaken would meet up and join at Zweiluetschinen.  Along the way, we saw many cows (Brown Swiss) and one fox (red).

When we got back to town, we decided to have lunch at the venerable Restaurant Schuh, right next to the Hohematte, the big, grassy meadow at the center of Interlaken, across from the Victoria Jungfrau Hotel.  We had a nice meal, watching the paragliders land after jumping off the heights surrounding the city.

We caught our train to Basel, where, making the wrong turn in the station, we had a little bit of trouble finding the airport bus.  But eventually, we caught our EasyJet plane to Amsterdam, where we were crammed like sardines onto the shuttle bus to the Schiphol Ibis Hotel—large, plain, simple and nothing more or less than we needed in order to get up early to catch another shuttle (be careful of the timing or you might not get onto the crowded bus) to the airport and take our KLM flight home (much more pleasant than the Delta flight on which we had flown to Europe).