We had a couple options of what to do during our second, and last, full day in Switzerland. Option A: stick around Bern and hopefully see some cyclists or Option B: go hiking in the alps. I told the boys that I was not going to leave Switzerland without seeing the alps. So Option B it was. It was by far my favorite day of the entire trip. I’ve always felt like I was meant to live in a more mountainous area (sorry, Midwest). I couldn’t even be angry about the sunburn I had by the end of the day.
We went to the tourist center in the train station and bought tickets to Lauterbrunnen. (Had we planned a bit more in advanced, I would have purchased the Swiss Pass for Tim and myself. It would have saved us money from all of the train travel we did while in Switzerland.) Aaron had just been to the area a couple weeks before so I felt kind of bad that we were heading there, but at the same time he knew exactly where we needed to go. Once in Lauterbrunnen, we took the train up to Wengen and then the Grindelwald–Männlichen gondola up to Männilchen to head out on a hike. It’s crazy to think that the train and/or gondola is the only way to get to those villages and resorts.
We hiked the Rotsteckli trail between the Männilchen trail head and the Grindelwaldblick Restaurant. I loved being able to look at the Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau mountain peaks the whole time. It took us about 2-3 hours to do the trail plus stopping along the way to eat our picnic lunch. Oh, and a cold beverage at the restaurant. While we were eating lunch, we watched what we think was the Swiss Air Force doing practice flights. A hilarious site was watching a helicopter bring in a new porta-potty and then take away the old one from an outpost. The hike was not hard by any means–people of all ages were doing it. There’s no shade coverage while on the trial, so I’m not surprised I got sunburnt.
We took the train back down to Lauterbrunnen from the Kleine Scheidegg train station, which took almost an hour. Aaron led us to the Staubbach Waterfall at the edge of town that had stairs to a lookout point behind the water. That was also really neat to see. There’s not much else in Lauterbrunnen, so we then headed to Interlaken. Interlaken was on my Switzerland wish-list so I was pretty excited we were heading there. What I wasn’t expecting was the amount of tourists there.
I’ve read that Interlaken has become more of a tourist hotspot over the last several years, but I didn’t expect to see the amount of people. It was already early evening when we arrived, so we weren’t able to explore as much as I would have liked. We stopped at a chocolate shop and ate dinner at Hüsi Bierhaus. The three of us agreed that the restaurant was the best we had while in Switzerland. The boys thought it would be funny to stop into the Hooters for a beer on our way back to the train station, so we did. It was pretty lame, not surprisingly.
We took one of the last trains out of the city and headed back to Bern. My sunburn was pretty red by that point and I was exhausted from being sick (still). We hung out at the AirBnb and packed up our things. Sadly, we were having to part ways the next morning.
–m.