Lauterbrunnen

Well, it's official. Laura's and my face are pinker shades of white! Go us!

Today was cloudy again, so we reverted to Simon yet again for a tip on what to do. He suggested Lauterbrunnen (Lauter = many, brunnen = waterfalls). It is a huge glacial-turned-U-shape-valley carved out between the Swiss Alps. And yes, it has many waterfalls.

Of course we were in, because there were no other options, but it also sounded really cool. After all, wandering around is pretty much what we do anyway, so we may as well do it in a new and beautiful part of Switzerland.

We had a few good things going our way. First of all, the train tickets and cable car tickets we ended up purchasing were cheap. Second of all, just because we have Eurail passes, we got a 25% discount off of everything. Sweet! Third of all, Laura didn't even have her Eurail passes with her, but nobody asked to see them. When you've taken the expensive mountain peak trip and the expensive Canyoning excursion out of the picture, we actually have spent very little money here in Switzerland so far. So cheap train and cable car tickets to go explore Lauterbrunnen were not a problem for us frugal travelers.

Once in Lauterbrunnen, another rural, resort-esque town in the off-season, we walked for an hour, maybe an hour and a half along the valley floor. Cliffs and green hills with brown houses dotted throughout on our left, and huge, colorful cliffs with waterfalls on our right. It was a very peaceful walk and eventually we reached the cable car station that would take us up to the top of the cliff to a town called Murren. The cable car station was across the street from the longest free-falling waterfall in Europe. The cable car was fun because we were getting closer and closer to eye level with the humongous snow capped mountains out the window. We reached Murren and were delighted to find that it was sunny where we were, and there were patches of blue sky surrounding some of the mountain peaks. This means we got some good pictures :) We were quite cold though and seeing the snowboarders and skiers come down from a day on the Alps made me jealous so after about 20 minutes we were on a train that ran along the top of the cliff. At the train's final stop, we hopped on another cable car which took us back down to where we started. Hopefully you're visualizing a large rectangle that scales an amazing canyon with lots of waterfalls, because that is what we did.

Soon, our day trip had come to an end and we took a train back to Interlaken and walked through the town (again) to get back to Simon's. His train to Prague wasn't until later, so it was nice to see him for another few minutes before parting ways. We're staying at his place without him or his roommate here. It seems kind of weird to me, but when you think like an awesome, trusting member of the CS community, it's not so weird. He just told us where the key was, asked us to tidy up, and that was that. It amazes me. I mean obviously Laura and I were never do anything harmful, but still - it would have been plenty easy to kick us out for that last night and tell us to go find a hostel (and yes, there is at least one hostel in Interlaken). So that was cool.

Laura and I had some food (read: pasta) left over from Amsterdam (which we got because we didn't hang out or eat with Hans ever), so now that it was just the two of us again sans host it was the perfect time to eat some of our movable pantry we've been carrying around. I cooked up the pasta, a Swiss sausage, and some turkey Simon practically forced us to eat and we had a delicious little dinner with our cold Swiss beers and some peppermint tea. It was pretty darn cute.

Interlaken doesn't have much of a night-life especially for frugal travelers in the off season so yet again we stayed in and sat in front of screens (Laura on her computer, me in front of the TV). So atypical, but I didn't bring any books or anything, so downtime is always a lesson in patience (or zoning out). Well, I guess I'm getting caught up on some old movies; tonight I watched Tootsie and it was cute, though Laura noticed that I kept just saying "Awkward" every few minutes...


Accomplishments:
Did laundry (thanks, Simon)!

Travel Tip:
Want to see the beauty of Switzerland and not break the bank? Go in the off-season, when everything you probably want to do is closed!


I'm a little sad to be leaving Interlaken tomorrow, but we still have another couple of days in Switzerland. It's cool that in this country we are getting to see so many different areas of it. The only (kind of) downside is that we are on the move a lot. Oh, Simon is going to be in Munich this weekend for mini Oktoberfest and he's going to be wearing a ridiculously traditional German outfit...I hope we run into him there!! He says if we're dressed normally we're the ones that will look weird though...This will be interesting! I am so excited by the idea of seeing CouchSurfers in other parts of Europe at a different time in our trip. So cool.

P.S. Edit: For the record, we got neighed at (yes you read that correctly) twice in Lauterbrunnen. What? Very weird but hysterically funny...