Oh, and on a happy note, our Cuckoo clock from Germany finally showed up! It’s up on the wall and ticking away. It’s also *really* high up. Those 8 day weights hang REAL long. I’ll put up pics later. So...
Our third day in Switzerland was as pretty as the second, mostly, and this day we wanted to head up the other side of the valley to the highest train station in Europe near the top of the Jungfrau Mountain. After lightening our day pack (less hiking, more train rides) we toddled down to the train station and bought our tickets two minutes before the train left. Nice timing. The trains on these mountains are special: because they gain so much altitude there is actually a gear on the trains that runs on these teeth in the middle of the track. Keeps it from slipping during steep and wintry ascents and descents. During the assent out of the valley we shared a car with a Chinese tourist family. There are few things louder than old Chinese ladies speaking Mandarin.
Jess at the halfway point.
The views on the way up were spectacular: slowly climbing the side of a mountain with the valley and Lauterbrunen spreading out below us. And with no clouds, we got to see a lot more, this time. The midpoint of our journey happened at Kleine Sheindig, clearly on it’s way out from ski season. The slopes looked like so much fun it made me wish I could ski. We could also see down over the other side of the mountain, toward a city named Grindelwald. We never got down there, but it looks very pretty from above. Then we transferred to he final train which climbed a little bit more and then disappeared into a tunnel. This tunnel is nearly 100 years old. The train system was actually built nearly 100 years ago by a thousand men, tons of dynamite and drills, and a pre-winter food drop that would make Costo jealous. It took 16 years and opened in 1912. How’s that for modern convenience?
On the way up the tunnel, the train stopped a couple of times to let us off at observation points: places where the tunnel meandered close enough to the side of the mountain that they had built windows for us to see down into Gimmerwald and over near some glacial formations. Impressive engineering, that. Their aim was pretty dead-on.
I took this one for dad. It's a snowblower. You want?
At the top, there is a lot to do, you just have to make sure you do it carefully, because you’re at 3454 meters of altitude. It’s easy to get winded. Our first stop was the Sphinx observation tower. They actually did have an observatory up there. Great views of the mountains with little clouds in the way. We were also surrounded by wires in what turned out, later, to be a Faraday cage. That’s what they put you in when you may get struck by lightning. Evidently it happens quite a lot, and without those wires, we’d be in real danger. With them? Safe as houses.
Jess outside. Always with the danger.
After that, we go to go OUTSIDE. It was really cool. My favorite part. When we first walked out it was cloudy and hard to see much of anything. There was a trail, though, so we wandered along for a couple hundred meters, then turned around when the clouds broke. We got to see the observatory and mountain top...and the sledding slope! They had disks there and a nice hill you could just ride down for as long as your altitude-weary legs could take you. Jess went once. I went three times, wearing myself out so much I had to take off my coat. Sledding on top of the highest mountain in Europe, though? Highlight.
That's the observatory behind us.
Next was the Ice palace. Probably more impressive during proper tourist season, they still had a pretty neat array of ice carvings in this structure that was literally just melted out of the ice. Can’t imagine how it’s so stable, but it is. My favorite structure was this big block of ice that people put their hands in to wear down hand prints. I did my part melting down a millimeter at most. Oh, and the ceiling and walls are all ice. So was the floor. We saw a couple of kids slip and fall. After that we went outside, again, to the ‘terrace’. A flat viewing area that was pretty cloudy when we went out. The entrance was also hyper-slippery with everyone walking on it. We wandered around and waved at the web cam.
Jess in the Ice Palace
After that, Jess was pretty worn out, so in an attempt to refuel we got some food. They had a cafeteria up there that had some decent faire, considering it all had to be brought up on a train. Jess had chicken and fries, and I had curry chicken. We put the spare curry all over everything. We watched another cheesy ‘multivision’ movie (the blinds closed automatically again. Kind of odd) and walked through the souvenir shop again but Jess clearly had ‘mountain burnout’ so we took the train back down. Jess was smart and got us seats on the downhill side because that meant that we were leaning back in our seats during the ride down, and pretty much everyone but me was taking a nap on the train. The nice couple across from us would fall asleep and then start to fall forward. Jess had to suppress giggles. Then she fell asleep, too.
We considered doing some hiking when we reached Kleine Sheindig, but Jess was pretty worn down so we just took the train. Jess slept some more and I listened to Chinese tour guides talking about things I couldn’t understand. Jess woke up near the bottom and told me I could sleep if I wanted, but I wasn’t tired and, evidently, that makes me superman. We wanted to get some food when we got back to Lauterbrunen but, If memory serves, it was Sunday afternoon and pretty much everything was closed. So instead we just had an early dinner, wrote a whole heck of a lot in our journal and Jess kicked my butt at rummy again. She did that rather a lot.
-N
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