Europe Part 15: Surprise Paragliding!

We decided to sleep in a little bit so we closed the blinds on the foggy eve the night before and crashed pretty well. When we woke up in the morning we tossed open the blinds and the view was SPECTACULAR. The clouds had cleared, the sun was out, and everything was shades of amazing. We had planned to go up to the other mountain on this day...but with the weather so unusually nice, we decided to figure out if we could go paragliding. Well the lady at the front desk of the hostel called them up for us and it turned out that they had a slot open in just another hour, and with the whether so nice we decided there could be no better opportunity to go up in the air. So we signed up.

We hung out around the hostel for a while and I saw a kitty! I think he belongs to the hostel. He was pretty old, but very affectionate. I gave him the patented ‘scratch petting’ which just pulled tons of hair off of him. He loved the attention and the cleaning. He did the little paw-kead thing on the concrete, even. I saw him a little later, too, napping in a box. He meowed at me to come over and give him more attention. So I did.


Swiss Kitty.

Before long our driver/pilot showed up and took us to our takeoff point over by Murren. (Which is up on the top of the cliffs where we had lunch the day before. The big empty city.) We milled around while we waited for the gondola to come down and pick us up, watching paragliders come over the lip of the cliff every two minutes or so. There are, reportedly, 20,000 registered paragliders in Switzerland. It’s kind of like getting your sports pilot license. And if there were places to glide around in my neighborhood that looked this good I’d probably get my license, too. Anyway, they all clearly knew what they were doing so we had nothing to worry about. So we took the gondola up the hill and then walked about 10 minutes further up the hill to the takeoff point. Kurt, my pilot, had all his gear on his back. That’s a workout.

Kurt started setting up his gear, very methodically, and Jess ended going with another pilot, Beni, just in front of me. She also took our camera, but all the pilots had these cool little cameras-on-a-stick that they would use to take pictures and movies of ourselves while we went.

Jess and Ben went first, and their takeoff was a little rough. They had to run down the hill a bit to get the momentum they needed. Kurt was much less rushed, and we just waited for a gust of wind which lifted the sail and then we stepped off into the air. Murren was really pretty from the air, the cute little village all spread out in front of us. We took a right and ended up hanging out over some trees with pretty dramatic thermals that kept lifting us higher and higher. We spiraled around for a while, gaining altitude pretty much the whole time, and then we went out over the cliff.

From Preecs Place: The family blog

Jess and her pilot.

So beautiful! The entire valley spread out before us in picturesque detail. It was a sight to see. We strolled around up and down, looking at the mountains, the waterfalls, and just taking it all in. Kurt took a bunch of pictures of us too. We ended up buying the pictures afterwards. They just gave us the memory card, which was a pretty slick way to go. Jess took some pictures, too, mostly of me from above and below.

From Preecs Place: The family blog

Me and my pilot.

Eventually, the demands of altitude meant we would have to land. Kurt, having done this a thousand times, at least, knew exactly *exactly* how to land. Jess had landed before us and was already out of her harness with the camera, so Kurt took us down right beside Jess and dropped the sail right on her head. The whole thing was just a blast.

Back at the hostel, we decided to head out to a supermarket for lunch. Some sandwiches, Madelines (delicious cookies) and 3 bars of chocolate later, we were back at the hostel in our kitchen area and eating. After the food, Jess felt like nap-vampiring me. That’s when she doesn’t need me to take a nap with her necessarily. She just wants to lay on my chest and have *her* take a nap. We relaxed for a while, but I woke her up when I had to sneeze.

After that, we had energy for some more activity, and w had a map of the trails around Lauterbrunen, down on the cliff floor, so that we wouldn’t have to take a Gondola up to the top of the cliff. So I sort of picked some routes, we gathered up the day pack, and we were on our way.


Jess discovers how I like my hikes: steep.

So as it turns out, I like picking the hardest possible hikes. If there’s an uphill fork and a downhill one, I’ll pick the uphill one, and *man* was this uphill. We didn’t get up to the top of the cliff, but the trail we were on evidently wound up there eventually, and we got about a third of the way up in altitude, by the look of it. *Very* steep. We walked by a waterfall, got a great view of the city below, and I *soaked* my shirt with all the sweat from carrying the backpack up the hill. Jess felt bad that she was getting tired after merely a short hike, until I reminded her that she was hiking the Swiss Alps, which is pretty much the english idiom for ‘doing something really hard’. She felt better after that. And after we started going downhill again. We saw some more cows, and a hell of a lot of firewood stacked up in cords. And then goats! When we were almost all the way back down we saw some goats and a llama hanging out in the backyard of someone’s farm. We stopped and looked at the little baby goats while the moms bleated at us to leave the children alone.

After getting back to ‘ground level’ near the train station, we took a (much less steep) hike up the other side of the valley, mostly through the town. Lots of pretty views of the river and peoples houses and gardens. We saw another cat walking kind of parallel to us, and eventually our paths crossed. She was a sweetie, but clearly on a mission. She let us pet her, but she had a route and she needed to get it walked. So we wandered along with her, stopping every once in a while to scritch her ear. She seemed to like the company, and got *really* into nuzzling my shoes. Eventually she wandered off into a field, presumably looking for lunch. We saw a lot of cats on our trip.

After our hike, we stopped off at “Air Time” one of the local coffee bar/internet cafe/laundry/backpacker haven shops that are so much fun. We checked the internet while I looked at the book exchange and it was a good thing we did. Turns out our hotel in Paris the last day got cancelled. We tried to make another reservation but the place wouldn’t take our card, for some reason. We decided to just wing it. We’ll come back to this thread later.


Good beer. Big, too.

Dinner at Hotel Oberland again, which was our favorite place to eat, as it turns out. Jess got a steak that she *devoured* and I had rosti with sausage. After dessert, and finishing our beers, we came back to the hostel to relax and write in our journals about such an amazing day.

-N