Europe Part 13: Mostly on trains

So much for Germany. Fantastic time but today, we get to go to Switzerland. We packed and then wandered around Fussen wasting some hours until our (planned) train left. Mostly it was seeing things we’d seen before, but there were a couple of new sights. We saw a woodworking shop that had rocking horses and rocking motorcycles, which was neat. A little farther down we stumbled on a farmers market, and after being hopped up on random pastries for so long we wanted something healthy. So we got some bananas, grapes, and I picked out three completely random apples that I’d never heard of before. They weren’t bad.


Food!

After a little more walking, and a bit of drizzle that I weathered with my emergency poncho (poor outer layer!), we went back to the train station and took it to Buchloe, our first stop on the way. We spent some time there, waiting for the train, and wandering around the city. We stopped at a random ‘1 Euro’ store and picked up some playing cards with naked ladies on them. We also got the naked men cards, just for balance. We strolled into a supermarket after that and Jess had to hold me back from buying *all the chocolate in the world*. We just got some of all of the chocolate in the world. Which is a lot of chocolate. Then we got some travel sandwiches at a cafe and hung out back at the train station.


You wish you had a chocolate aisle like this a the Safeway.

Then more time on trains. Not all of it bad, we got to read some and listen to podcasts and Jess fell asleep on my shoulder. I really like when she does that. Then after a bit we crossed the border into SWITZERLAND! Then our train turned around and went back through germany a bit and then back into SWITZERLAND again. We had a couple more transfers, one in Zurich and one in Bern, which is kind of like routing your flight through LAX and Seattle. Big hubs. Zurich was pretty normal but Bern looked like an enormous subway transfer station. All underground. Kinda spooky, but we managed to route just fine.

After that we found ourselves on a train to Interlochen, which means ‘between the lakes’. It’s between a couple of big lakes and the train rolls along the shore. The view with the mountains behind the pristine lakes was really something to behold. We gawked at it so much that one of the locals engaged us in conversation. I think she liked how awed we were by her country. It was something to see.



We. Are. Adorable.

The train from Interlochen to Lauterbrunen was *steep*. So steep, in fact, that it used a gear system to keep from slipping. Pretty, too. The valley kept going and going, revealing more and more beauty as we went. We spent most of the train ride with our mouths hanging open, I think. When we got up to Lauterbrunen, Switzerland, were we’d be making our base camp for the next four nights, we saw the tradeoff between going earlier in the year. The mountains were kind of cloudy above a certain elevation and there was still a lot of snow clinging to the top of the mountains, but the fact that we had come in the rainier season meant that we got *waterfalls*. Tons of them! Lauterbrunen exists in this incredibly pretty but STEEP valley, with sheer walls on either side that lead up to two mountains. Jungfrau and Schilthorn. We’d see both, in time, but the cliffs themselves just had waterfalls all over them. So gorgeous.

We checked in to our hostel (more on the hostel later) and went off to have some dinner. I had a traditional dish called Rosti, which is pretty much hash brown. But *traditional* hash browns that only use specific potatoes. It’s good food, either way. And a banana split for dinner. Jess saw that there was Fondue on the menu too late, though, so she got really excited for that the next day. Then we went back to the room and, with the waterfalls streaming away in the background, discussed what we felt like doing with all of our time.

-N