Pictures (More Text Soon)

I've been overwhelmed with catching up with home-related stuff, so the next post, a long one about our day looking around Lyon, is coming along slowly.  It should be posted within a few days.  My last post appears to have been truncated, so I've fixed that, as well as adding pictures to everything posted so far.  Soon!

Lunch in Geneva and Dinner in Lyon

On Thursday, July 23, we had an early breakfast and said goodbye to Andreas, and Eva drove us to the station.  We bought our tickets and Eva waited with us for the 8:29 train to Lucerne.  We said goodbye and headed off on our longest day of train travel.  We changed trains in Lucerne, and at 11:46 we arrived in Geneva, where we had decided to make a lunch stop.  We had about three-and-three-quarter hours, so first we visited the restrooms.

Public restrooms in Europe are generally pay.  Sometimes (as at the TGV train station in Avignon), there is a live person whom you pay at a desk.  At the Geneva station there is a coin-operated turnstile--one euro or one-and-a-half Swiss francs.  Given current exchange rates, where the euro and franc have nearly the same value, a little more than a dollar, one would be better off paying the euro of course.  However, we were leaving Switzerland, had Swiss coins and didn't have euro coins.  Mary Joy put in a franc and three twenty-cent coins, she was about to go through the turnstile, when she realized that the machine had given her ten cents change.  When she went back to pick it up, however, the turnstile turned over and she was locked out.  Just then, a man went through, and Mary Joy went through right after him.  The machine didn't like this, however, and made noises, alerting the restroom attendant, who told Mary Joy that she couldn't do that.  She responded rather vehemently that she had every right to do that, because she had paid her one franc fifty but had been locked out while collecting her change.  The attendant didn't look convinced, but gave up, muttering the French equivalent of "Whatever."

Tourist Information, just outside the station, told us where to store our luggage (there are lockers in the station, but they're hard to find) and gave us a map.  We walked across the Rhone and up the hill to the Old Town, then went into the medieval cathedral.  Mary Joy didn't care for its Calvinist austerity.

 When we came out, there were a couple of Geneva Tourist Angels, dressed in orange tee-shirts and baseball caps, pointing something out on a map for some people.  Mary Joy suggested asking them where to eat lunch.  I didn't think they would be allowed to recommend a particular restaurant, but when Mary Joy asked them if there were someplace nearby where we could eat good food inexpensively and quickly, they immediately suggested a restaurant called Chez Ma Cousine.  This was a good tip.  They specialize in chicken, particularly, a roasted half-chicken with potatoes and a salad.  According to them, their chickens must be nearly as happy and self-fulfilled as the Dutch chickens that laid the eggs for our sandwiches on the flight to Copenhagen.  Mary Joy had one of these menus, along with a good local wine, and was very pleased with both.  I don't remember what I had, but I remember liking it.

We then went down to the lakefront, where people were taking pictures of other people with the 459-foot-high spray of the Jet d'Eau fountain in the background.  Of course, we did the same.

We walked awhile along the lakeshore, which was crowded and noisy and not very pretty, then turned and walked back to the station, where we caught the 3:30 train to Lyon.

We arrived at Lyon's Part-Dieu railroad station a little before 5:30.  The first order of business was to get a French SIM card for the phone we had bought in Basel.  We had not been thrilled with this phone.  How to use it wasn't intuitive, and our Salt contract was more expensive to call with than we'd expected--a third of a franc per minute to Swiss numbers and a whole franc to the U.S.  After a few strikeouts we found an SFR French SIM card for five euros at a news-tobacco shop.

Then we found the Metro station, bought tickets (I was a little worried because someone on some website hadn't been able to use his American credit card in the machine, but my Visa worked), took the B line two stops, to Charpennes, changed to the A line and went three stops to Hotel de Ville (City Hall).  Across the street from the rear of the Hotel de Ville is The 1831 Opera House, as renovated, with a new barrel-vaulted glass and steel top floor, by Jean Nouvel (see previous post).

We went around the Hotel de Ville, and at the northeast corner of the Place des Terreaux  (a large square faced by the Hotel de Ville and the Musee de Beaux Arts, and with a large fountain by Bartholdi, creator of the Statue of Liberty), we headed up the hill into the Croix-Rousse district.  A few minutes later, we were in front of an unmarked door.  I typed a number code on a keypad, then opened the door onto a passageway, into a courtyard.  The next day we would discover that this was exactly like one of the city's famous "traboules," except that it wasn't open to the public and there wasn't another passage through to the other side of the block.  We crossed the courtyard and the apartment door directly ahead had the sign for our B&B, Nos Chambres en Ville.

We were warmly welcomed by our hostess, Karine, whose English is good, but she was more comfortable speaking French with Mary Joy, whose French she later complimented.  Our room, on the ground floor, facing the courtyard, was very pleasant.

I tried to insert the new SIM card into the phone, but it wouldn't work.  When I tried taking out and putting back the battery, then the phone itself went completely dead!  After trying for quite a while to get it to work, I gave up and bought ten euros worth of time on Skype for the iPad.  The principal reason for wanting the phone was so Mary a Joy could call her mother, and while we could only use Skype for phoning when we had WiFi, that would presumably work for Mary Joy's purposes, most of the time.  We tried phoning, got the answering machine and left a message.  Mary Joy wondered why no one was home.  Actually, we discovered later, caller ID on her mother's phone indicated that it was a spam call, so no one picked up, and no one listened to the message.

Now it was time for dinner.  I had Lonely Planet's Lyon guide on the iPad, so we picked out an interesting restaurant in the neighborhood and went to find it.  One problem with visiting European cities in July or, especially, August, is that all the city-dwellers take their vacations then, and, as we would discover in a few days, go to Provence, or some similar tourist destination.  Eric Rohmer made a film (The Green Ray) about a young French woman's need to find the perfect escape from Paris, since everyone else is gone, and although she is alone and depressed from a recent breakup, she can't simply stay in the city during summer vacation.  Restaurateurs also go on vacation, and that was the case with the restaurant that we had chosen.  Since I had the iPad along in my daypack, we looked for a nearby alternative.

La Boname de Bruno was in a classy, high-ceilinged room.  Mary Joy had a smoked salmon appetizer in a very refined sauce, with herbs, while I had an unusual gazpacho--it had the normal tomato base, but with chunks of avocado and smoked herring!  We both had for the main dish a rice-vegetable salad with shrimp, slices of duck breast and a tamarind sauce.  Dessert for me was a tiramisu on a bed of mixed berries, I think, while Mary Joy had roasted figs with anise sauce and anise ice cream.  All very, very nice.  Lyon has the reputation for being the cuisine capital of France (just like, as I later pointed out on Facebook, Mary Joy's hometown of Monroe, Wisconsin is the cheese capital of Wisconsin).  We had some truly wonderful meals in Lyon, and this was one of them.

The Stanserhorn and Lucerne

On Wednesday, July 22nd, after a nice breakfast, Eva, Mary Joy and I caught a bus to the train station, where we got on a train to Lucerne. There we changed to a train to Stans. In Stans, we took the funicular and cable car up the Stanserhorn. This is a relatively new cable car, built in 2012. Eva had never been up it. We walked up to the top. There is a spectacular view of Stans, Lucerne and Lake Lucerne, as well as Mount Pilatus. We could see all the way to Zug and the Zugersee.

Then we had a salad at the restaurant and went back down to Stans, where we caught the train back to Lucerne. Mary Joy and I hadn't been to Lucerne in many years, so Eva walked us over to the new KKL concert hall and convention center, designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, who designed the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. We couldn't go in, because Lucerne was in the middle of a rock festival.

On the spur of the moment, we decided to take the boat tour on the lake, with narration from one of those audioguides that hangs around your neck and can be set to various languages. It was very pleasant to be out on the water.

There was a group of young women, wrapped from head to toe, with only their faces showing. They had a chaperone, and I think one man, wearing a "Kuwait" tee shirt, maybe a driver, was associated with them when they got on and off. They were very excited, talking, laughing, taking pictures of one another. On a hot day, their dress was in extreme contrast to the tank tops and shorts worn aboard by most of the other women their age. One of them loosened her headscarf and rearranged her hair under it in the reflection from some glass.

Dark clouds were rolling in as we came back to port, and as we walked over to the Jesuit Church, a few drops fell. We visited the church, which was under repair.

Mary Joy was interested in the organ. Then we walked across the river and through the Old Town to the Kapellbruecke (Chapel Bridge), the famous long, medieval, wooden, covered footbridge, with 17th-century paintings. It had been largely destroyed by fire in 1993, and you can tell which parts are original and which are restored.

We crossed back over and as we approached the Post Office, the skies opened up into a downpour. After Mary Joy bought some stamps, we tried to wait out the rain, but it was still coming down so hard that the vestibule floor had standing water until they closed the door and mopped it up. We decided to make a run for it across the street to the railroad station, and didn't get too, too wet.

We took the train back to Zug (twenty minutes). We had intended to eat dinner out, at an outdoor restaurant, but the weather made that impossible, so Andreas again cooked a very nice dinner.

 

The Kilchbalm and Some Tight Connections

We had considered going up the Schilthorn the next morning, Tuesday, July 21st, and the weather was beautiful,but we had done that several times before, and it's very expensive. Instead, after the buffet breakfast at the Pension, we tried a trail that was new to us: from Gimmelwald up the valley of the Sefinen creek to a meadow, surrounded by rock walls, called the Kilchbalm--or Chilchbalm.

Either spelling was used on the signage and in the guidebook materials. Rick Steves says that it is an easy hike, two hours out, and then back over the same route, with an increase in altitude of only 800 feet. This is misleading. There is a net increase of 800 feet: 450 feet down, followed by 1250 feet up, in some places fairly steep. At one point near the end there is a very short but steep climb on loose gravel. The last hour of the hour-and-a-half outward hike is, in some places, like climbing a series of stairs. Much of the walk is through a pine forest. Eventually, the view back down the valley becomes a panorama of the standard local threesome, Ogre, Monk and Maiden.

We were on a fairly tight schedule, since we needed to catch a train at Interlaken Ost at 3:04 and therefore should catch the 12:30 cable car down to Stechelberg. Given the uphillness of the trail, we felt that we were going more slowly than the signage-predicted hour-and-a-half. Our turn-back time of 10:30 was fast approaching, and we came to the conclusion that it was unlikely that we would get to the Kilchbalm soon enough. We reached a bench and rested. I was in favor of turning around immediately, but Mary Joy wanted to go on a little farther, even though we couldn't see anything other than more pine trees. Shortly after starting out, she met an elderly woman coming, alone, from the other direction. This woman assured her that the Kilchbalm was only five or ten minutes farther. So we went on, and we're glad that we did, not so much because the place was spectacular (it was nice but not overwhelming--on the scenery scale not quite up to the level of Crater Lake, at the end of the Maroon Bells walk near Aspen, Colorado), but because we would have wondered what we had missed.

The walk back was a little faster, and we got back to Pension Gimmelwald before noon, so we had a quick lunch on the terrace. Then we picked up our luggage and went to the cable car. However, the ticket booth was closed until 2:30, the next cable car was in ten minutes and we didn't have our tickets! I didn't have enough change for the ticket machine, so Mary Joy went back to the Pension to get some. I goofed up my first try at getting tickets out of the machine, but instead of giving me my money back, the machine gave me a printed voucher. When I used the coins Mary Joy had gotten, it gave me our tickets, but another voucher instead of change.

We caught the cable car down, and when I had explained things at the ticket booth there, the man very nicely, instead of merely cashing our vouchers, recalculated our fares to make use of the half-fare cards, printed our bus tickets to Lauterbrunnen and gave us ten francs (a little more than ten dollars) change. By then, however, we had missed the bus, whose schedule is synchronized with the arrival of the cable car. We had to wait half an hour for the next bus. By the time we arrived in Lauterbrunnen, there were less than ten minutes until the train to Interlaken that we needed to catch in order to catch the train to Zug that would get us there at 5:30, as we had told Mary Joy's cousin Eva.

There was a line in the ticket office: two groups ahead of us, and the first one apparently had a complicated issue to deal with. Then another clerk appeared and opened up another line. We were closest to him, and Mary Joy immediately went to him and started to ask for tickets to Zug, although one of the two guys in the group immediately ahead of us in the first line grumbled about it. We picked up our tickets and caught the train to Interlaken Ost, still a little worried that we might not get there in time. However, when the conductor came around, we discovered that we had another problem: our tickets were not from Lauterbrunnen to Zug but from Interlaken Ost to Zug! I had visions of us being tossed of the train in Zweiluetschinen, but, in the end, the conductor allowed us to buy tickets on the spot, for three francs and eighty cents apiece.

We were indeed in time to catch the next train to Lucerne, where we picked up a train to Zug: total time, nearly two-and-a-half hours. Eva was there to greet us and drove us to the apartment she shares with her husband Andreas. That evening, Andreas, as usual, cooked a wonderful dinner, which we shared with them and Eva's sister and brother-in-law, Sylvia and Kurt--a very pleasant evening.

Eva and Sylvia, Albert's daughters, are Mary Joy's third cousins once removed--Mary Joy's great-great-grandfather, Karl, was an older brother of Sylvia and Eva's great-grandfather, Fritz. Karl, you may remember, was somehow involved with the Unterseen Stadthaus, while Fritz became a successful businessman. Their brother Robert went to Wisconsin to make cheese, where he was later joined by Karl's son, also named Robert--Mary Joy's great-grandfather.

Gimmelwald and Above

On the morning of Monday, July 20th, we said goodbye to our apartment in Unterseen and headed for the mountains. We have now stayed three times at one of the apartments over Frau Eggimann's shop. It is very comfortable and pleasant, and very well located, while our hostess is very nice. At times it can be a little noisy, as it faces the Bahnhofstrasse, the busiest street in Unterseen, but it's a five-minute walk from the West train station. It is across the street from the Coop supermarket and a few blocks from the Michel bakery.

We took the train from West to Ost, then the train to Lauterbrunnen. The normal way to Gimmelwald is to take the bus up the valley of the White Luetschine from Lauterbrunnen to Stechelberg, then the Schilthornbahn cable car up to its first stop. However, the Rick Steves book suggested, as more scenic, a slightly more roundabout route: go up the cable car from Lauterbrunnen to Gruetschalp, take the train along the rim above the valley, to Muerren, then go down the Schilthornbahn one stop to Gimmelwald. As I presented my ticket to the man at the cable car turnstile, he refused it, saying that the way to Gimmelwald was to take the bus to Stechelberg, but I insisted, pointing to the "VIA MUERREN" on my ticket, so he let us through.

The last time we were on this cable car, I don't know how many years ago, it wasn't a cable car but a funicular. We had gone the opposite direction, taking the train from Muerren to Gruetschalp, then went down the funicular, sharing a car with a group of people with northern English accents, who laughed at us for having watched "Hetty Wainthropp Investigates," a British TV series about a detective in northern England, on PBS. But some years ago, an avalanche wiped out the funicular, so it had been replaced by this cable car.

As we herded int the large car, we were almost bumped up against a woman who looked at Mary Joy and said: "I know you. Aren't you Mary Joy?" Mary Joy immediately recognized her as a fellow organist from the Twin Cities, a former student of our good friend Steve. Steve had played at our wedding, and just a few weeks ago had helped Mary Joy prepare for her recital at Wayzata Community Church, then turned pages and pulled stops for her during the recital itself. This woman, Karen, took a picture of Mary Joy with her phone and said: "I'll send this to Steve right away. He'll bust a gut!" She and her husband had taken a river cruise and were finishing up by visiting Switzerland, and were now, I think, on their way to the Schilthorn. The odds against their choosing this particular route at the exact same time that we were taking this particular way to Gimmelwald must be astronomical. It is, indeed, a small world.

The short train ride was less scenic for us than it might have been, since we were late getting aboard and had to sit on the right side of the train, away from the view across the valley to the Eiger, Moench and Jungfrau. After leaving the train, we walked for what seemed like ages through the elongated village of Muerren, from the train station at its north end to the cable car at its south end. Muerren became a ski resort back in the 1920s, mostly frequented by the British.

We caught the next cable car down to Gimmelwald, and walked up the street to the Pension Gimmelwald.

Gimmelwald is one of Rick Steves's "back doors": theoretically, a small, untouristed place that allows you to get in touch with the real essence of a European country. Sometimes one of his "back doors" is discovered by Europeans and becomes a mainstream tourist center: Steves "found" the Cinque Terre, on the Italian Riviera, and now it's a national park and thronged with hikers and people who just like to hang out in a picturesque Italian coastal town, like Vernazza, that doesn't have a beach and so isn't wall-to-wall with tanning bodies.

Gimmelwald, on the other hand, has not been "discovered"--except by Americans wandering the village streets with their blue-and-orange Rick Steves guidebooks. Every single person that we saw and heard at the Pension Gimmelwald, one of the two restaurants in town, during the three meals that we ate there, was an American.

Gimmelwald is a cute little village, is more authentic than a resort like Muerren or Grindelwald, and it provides a decent base for doing some hikes (though Muerren may be better), but it is not exactly exciting.

The Pension is an old, rustic, three-story building run by a group of young Brits. Most rooms don't have their own bathrooms, but ours, Room 6 on the second floor (third floor, as Americans would count them), is one of the exceptions. The room was comfortable and pleasant. European windows almost never have screens, so you learn to live with an occasional fly or mosquito. The WiFi there wasn't exactly high-bandwidth, but was good enough for e-mail and a little browsing--not for downloading or uploading anything.

After checking in, we decided to have lunch at Almendhubel and come back down to Gimmelwald via the North Face Trail. We took the cable car back to Muerren, then another up to Almendhubel. There is a restaurant there with a good reputation, so that's where we had lunch. I must admit that as I write this, two weeks later, I can't remember what we ate or even whether we liked it.

I will not describe the North Face Trail in detail, since I have done that before--this was the third time that we have walked it.

The trail gets its name from a series of boards along it pointing out all the individual peaks whose north faces were visible, and showing how those north faces were conquered by mountain climbers. It is longer (about two-and-half hours long) than the trail from Maennlichen to Kleine Steidegg and a little more difficult. It starts by going down a little, then gradually up, up, up, then gradually down again, a lot.

Rick Steves got us mixed up at the beginning of the trail the previous time we walked it, and he still hasn't gotten it right in the latest book. Instead of beginning down below Almendhubel, at Sonnenberg, it begins at the end of the Flower Trail, up behind Almendhubel. It then goes down the hill, not even going to Sonnenberg,but passing at a slight distance. Sonnenberg is one of the three farm-restaurants along the route, the others being Suppenalp, where the trail starts going up, and Schiltalp, just after it starts coming down again. An "alp" is a place where farmers stay during the summer to graze cattle in the high mountain meadows. They may also make cheese there--Bergkaese (mountain cheese).

At Schiltalp we bought some cheese, and also some homemade apricot jam.

We tried to take the alternate route down to Gimmelwald, but lost it somehow, trying to avoid the trail that passes behind the Sprutz waterfall--a slippery path--and found ourselves back on the regular North Face Trail, as it came around to Muerren. At this point we met a Scottish family--father, mother, daughter and son--who were resting before taking on what looked to be a rather steep path down to Gimmelwald. In recent years they had spent their vacation in Virginia and Florida, but today they were celebrating the son's twelfth birthday by having taken the cable car up to the Schilthorn, then, because the weather up there wasn't great, taking it back down a little way to Birg, walking all the way down to Almendhubel, then around to here on the North Face Trail! The mother, by the way, had bad knees, so she was using walking sticks! This made us feel old and out of shape, especially since we decided not to go down that steep-looking path with them to Gimmelwald, but to go into Muerren and take the cable car down.

We had dinner on the very scenic terrace at the Pension. They had a menu limited to soup, a pasta-and-meat dish, I forget exactly what, and dessert. I had their house.beer, "Schwartz Moench" ("Black Monk"), named after the huge rock outcrop at the base of the Moench and Jungfrau, immediately across the Lauterbrunnen valley. Not bad.

The Niesenbahn and Spiez

On Sunday, July 19th, after breakfast (our usual Interlaken breakfast of muesli with milk and fruit, orange juice and instant coffee, with half a nussgipfli (a croissant filled with hazelnut paste). Then we went to the station and bought tickets to the Niesen Kulm.

The Niesen (which, oddly, means "Sneeze" in the local dialect) is a prominent mountain in the Interlaken area, but I had never heard of it before. It is the northernmost point of the range that separates the Kander and Simmen valleys. Old (and new) pictures of Unterseen's quaint Old Town show it in the distance,

while it towers over Spiez and the Lake of Thun like a dark pyramid. In fact, the ads for the Niesenbahn funicular call the mountain "the Swiss Pyramid." On the mountain there was a display of copies of artistic representations of the mountain. The painter Paul Klee, himself Swiss, seems to have seen its shape as a sort of mystical abstraction.

We took the train to Spiez, where we boarded a local train in the direction of Brig. The first stop on the line, a few kilometers south of Spiez, is Muelenen, where the train stops only by request. The directions in the train as to how to do this are pretty clear: as soon as the train has left Spiez you can push a button by the door and a green light comes on, then, when the train arrives at Muelenen, it stops and you get off and pass under the tracks and follow the signs to the Niesenbahn.

This is one of the older, slower funiculars around, over a hundred years old, and goes up the mountain in two stages, taking half an hour, running every thirty minutes. In our car was a very gregarious old (at least 80) Swiss man, named Erwin, who cracked everyone up with his imitation of an alphorn and other musical instruments (performing James Bond music, "Caravans," etc.).

At the top, as with all Swiss funiculars, there was a restaurant, where we had lunch on the terrace--again I had bratwurst in onion sauce with roesti--not as good as in Basel.

We walked up to the viewing platform, from which we had a beautiful view, pretty far to the west, east, and north, though there was a little bit of haze.

Along the way were boards telling about the geography, zoology and history of the Niesen. A hotel and restaurant had been built there in the 1850s, when the only way to the top was to walk or be carried up by mule or sedan chair. The building of the funicular in 1910 had no doubt increased the number of visitors.

Looking up the Simmental (the valley of the river Simmen) we couldn't see up to Zweisimmen, where the ancestors of one of Mary Joy's church cantors had come from, or beyond that, not many miles, to Sankt Stefan, where Mary Joy's ancestors had lived before being drawn down to Unterseen for better opportunities.

We went back down to Mulenen (by funicular, not by mule or sedan chair), and since the train back to Spiez ran about every half hour, we took a walk into the tiny, unexciting village and back to the stations. To stop the train, as an illustrated sign pointed out, you would not stand by the tracks and try to wave it down, but would push a button, and the fact that the next train had been notified that you were waiting would be indicated by a red light turning off and a green light turning on.

We had considered going on to Thun by lake ferry, but decided that the schedules wouldn't work out--so instead, we would take the train from Spiez back to Interlaken. This left us with a little time to explore Spiez. It is a very pleasant lake resort, with a small, gardened castle that has art exhibitions.

Walking back to the station from the lakeside was a bit of a climb, and we might have had a little trouble finding our way if we hadn't received a nice, unsolicited offer of help from a couple of local men, who walked with us nearly the whole way.

It started to rain, pretty heavily, while we were on the train. A Chinese woman across from us was taking picture after picture of the lake and the mountains on the other side, through the rain, with her cellphone. The twenty-minute ride from Spiez to Interlaken West is, indeed, the most beautiful short train ride I've ever been on, and gives me a wonderful feeling of homecoming whenever we approach Interlaken for the first time again after a year or years away.

The rain had finished when we met Albert again and walked to dinner at the Cafe de Paris, on the Marktplatz. I don't remember exactly what we had, but it was good, and we spent a pleasant time with Albert.

Interlaken and Above

On Saturday, July 18th, I let Mary Joy sleep in until about 8, which was against her strict orders, since we wanted to go up into the mountains, maybe to do the six-hour hike from Schynigge Platte to First, with the lakes down below on our left and the peaks above to our right. The problems with this project were several: first, that we should have started earlier; second, that the forecast was for rain and thunderstorms, starting around 2 p.m.; third, that my legs were giving me trouble,and I couldn't be sure that my right knee, right hamstring and left hip wouldn't conspire against my being able to finish a long walk. For lack of imagination and time, we decided to do the easy but spectacular walk from Maennlichen to Kleine Scheidegg, something we've done a number of times.

I picked up a couple of ham and cheese sandwiches at our usual Interlaken sandwich provider, the Michel bakery, at the corner of Bahnhofstrasse and Seestrasse in Unterseen. Then we headed for the West station and bought our tickets to Kleine Scheidegg, via lauterbrunnen and Wengen. We weren't sure what route we'd use to get back, so we didn't buy return tickets. Apparently, we got a discount not only for our half-fare card, but for the Interlaken city card that we got with our apartment. So, as we have done several times before, we took the train to Interlaken Ost, changed to another train to Lauterbrunnen, then caught the rack railway to Wengen. On that train we met a young couple from Seoul, Korea, who were staying in Lausanne, and were doing a day trip from there: two-and-a-half hours by train each way from there to Interlaken. Like most passengers on this train, they were on their way to Kleine Scheidegg to catch the Jungfraubahn train up to the Jungfraujoch, the self-described "Top of Europe." We had done the Jungfraujoch trip on our honeymoon, back in 1998. It goes fairly quickly up from Kleine Scheidegg's 2,061 meters (somewhat under 7,000 feet) to a point at 3,454 meters (over 11,000 feet) on the "yoke" between the Moench and the Jungfrau. The Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park gets higher, but you start that from a much higher point, and if you start your Jungfraujoch day in Interlaken, you have a very substantial gain in altitude in a relatively short time. I felt slightly nauseous on the Jungfraujoch. The view is spectacular on a clear day. If it isn't clear, you're out of luck.

But we were getting off at Wengen and walked through the village to the cable car, which we rode up to Maennlichen. Maennlichen is basically two cable car stations (the one from Wengen and the Lauterbrunnen Valley to the west and the much longer one from Grindelwald Grund to the east) and a restaurant.

I won't do another description of the wonderful, one-hour-plus walk to Kleine Scheidegg, since I blogged about it in 2012. This time, while the weather wasn't bad enough to make the Eiger, Moench and Jungfrau disappear entirely, they sometimes partly veiled themselves in wispy clouds. It started to drizzle, but not very heavily, and eventually that petered out entirely. It was cool enough to wear a light sweater, but just barely, and later in the day I took that off.

Again this year, as we descended to Kleine Scheidegg we saw the two odd American Plains Indian tepees (one of them huge, with the Coca-Cola logo) across the tracks from the station.

At this point, we had to decide what to do next. We could take the rack railway to Grindelwald or Wengen, but the weather seemed to be clearing up, so we bought tickets for further down the line, from Alpiglen to Interlaken Ost, via Grindelwald, and walked down to Alpiglen. This was a descent of 435 meters (about 1450 feet). Walking down is harder on the legs and knees than walking up, as we discovered once by walking all the way down from Maennlichen to Grindelwald, hobbling gamely at the end. This walk, crossing through pines, directly below the famous north face of the Eiger, killer of mountaineers, wasn't difficult, but it wasn't nearly as easy or as pleasant as the one we had just finished.

After less than an hour, we arrived at Alpiglen, little more than a station and a restaurant, and caught a train into Grindelwald.

Grindelwald is a spread-out resort town. J.K. Rowling has apparently been there, since one of the characters in the later Harry Potter books is named Gellert Grindelwald. We took a train down the valley of the Black Luetschine (Lauterbrunnen is on the White Luetschine), to Interlaken Ost, then, again, walked along the river Aare to Unterseen,

but this time we had errands to run, so we crossed back over to Interlaken by the Spielmatte and Marktgasse.

Our attention was caught by a woodcarving shop, called Woodpecker, that had nice work in the window, so we went in and Mary Joy bought some small things for gifts, as well as a set of salad spoons for ourselves. Then we went to the Marktplatz, to the Rieder Confiserie, where we picked up some of their wonderful confections, also for gifts (mostly).

Later that afternoon we visited Mary Joy's cousin Albert, and he treated us to ice cream on the terrace at Restaurant Schuh, a classic Swiss restaurant on the Hoheweg (Interlaken's main tourist street running from the West station to the East station), next to the Hohematte, the big, grassy area that gives you the quintessential Interlaken view: sitting right in the middle of the gap caused by the Lauterbrunnen valley is the Jungfrau herself (unless she has disappeared in the mist). Across the street from the Hohematte and cater-corner from Schuh, to take full advantage of this sight, is the grande dame of Interlaken hotels, the very Victorian Victoria Jungfrau,

As usual, the Hohematte provided a landing pad for para-gliders, dropping down from the Harder and other surrounding heights, miraculously avoiding the ugly, incongruous skyscraper of the Hotel Metropole. The Hoheweg was thronged with tourists from seemingly every nation on earth. In particular evidence were Muslim women, wearing either scarves or face-covering, head-to-toe robes. Someone told us that since the Ramadan fast had just ended, Muslim tourists were all arriving at once.

After saying good night to Albert, we went to the Catholic church (Heilige Dreifaltigkeit--Holy Trinity) on the other side of the Hohematte, to catch what we could of the 6:00 mass. Interestingly, as in our parish back home, the priest was Indian. His homily seemed to be passionate and deep (at least, as far as I could tell from how he spoke, since my German wasn't up to total comprehension of what he was saying). Mary Joy liked the organ and how it was played.

Afterwards, outside, we tried to get oriented as to where the original Inter Lacus ("between the lakes") monastery had been, which had given the city its name. The woman who had lectored at mass overheard us and gave us some directions. Her English was excellent, as she worked in the city tourism office, assisting perplexed foreigners. One problem they were having was that the unexpected heat was making people from warmer climates expect air conditioning, but Interlaken hotels don't have it. She and Mary Joy had an impassioned talk about church music, in Interlaken and St. Paul. She was originally from Vienna. Someone later told us that at one time, most Swiss tourism offices had been staffed by Austrians, but now much of the staff was Czech.

We decided to go to have dinner at the Goldener Anker. We'd eaten there before, and it had good reviews. We were outdoors, and in front of me there was an Indian-American family that was looking for something vegetarian to eat. They apparently found it, at least at the salad bar. Behind me was a family from New York. Mary Joy and I both had grilled perch from the mountain lakes--very good. As usual, we walked back along the Aare.