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

Europe Part 14: The Little Mountain

We wake up in the morning and it’s a little overcast. Remember how I said Lauterbrunen is in the middle of a really steep valley? Well when it’s overcast it’s kind of like being in a box. Two big walls and a really big ceiling. It’s all still really pretty, though. The cliffs are beautiful, the waterfall is streaming...it’s a gorgeous sight. We wandered a bit and picked up some breakfast items at a nearby market and brought it back to the hostel...

Let me digress, briefly, to talk about Valley Hostel, which is, currently, my favorite hostel in the world. It’s got all the basics of what you need to be a hostel. It’s got good clean rooms, it’s got low prices that it subsidizes by having you do some stuff for your own darn self, it’s got shared bathrooms, the whole nine yards. But it’s got so much MORE, too! For starters, it’s got this whole locker room area downstairs where, if your bathroom is being used, you can head down and use one of three bathrooms or three showers that are never full and always available. It’s got a drying room for your wet or recently-washed clothes. It’s got a nice, clean communal kitchen area where we ate breakfast from stuff we could buy and families of chinese tourists made dinner every night that smelled pretty fantastic. Three of them, even! It had a window view of the waterfalls that was nothing short of magnificent at any time of day or bent of weather. And a cat! He was adorable, and very friendly, even though he doesn’t get enough attention, based on how much fur I got off him. Cute! Best hostel in the world, so far.


It was a little cold in the morning.

After acquiring breakfast, we noticed the coat shop was open, and they seemed to sell some quality-looking coats. So we stroll in and start looking. The first coat I look at is $740. Holy mackerel! That’s crazy! They’re no way we’re going to be able to--oh, wait, the rest of them are all totally normal, nevermind. We shopped around for another protective outer layer, something waterproof to go over my regular coat because we can see up in the mountain that we’re planning to hit up later in the day and thar be snow up there. So we find the coat, looks and feels and works great (and us Alaskans know our coats). Then we gear up with our gloves, our hats, our long johns, our coats, our day pack filled with trail mix and water and we HIT THAT MOUNTAIN.

First up was a gondola ride up to the top of the cliff that cast all of Lauterbrunen and the valley into beautiful relief. Then we ended up in the clouds for most of the rest of the ride and arrived at the top of the gondola. The traditional route is to take a train to Muren, but we didn’t want to take a train. We wanted to hike. So we did. The trail said it was about 1.5 hours long, and we weren’t even taking the direct route. We took another path that went pretty much straight up the foothills of the mountain and while we didn’t require any climbing gear or anything, it was a heck of a workout, especially with the altitude. Within just a few minutes we were walking among the snow with our coats around our waists and sweating.

Up and up we climb, periodically turning around to marvel at how much freaking altitude we’ve gained. The snow was just a light dusting for a while, and the path was a little thin. And then, after a little while, the trail got thinner and the snow got thicker. Sure, there were some footprints, but we didn’t know the area and we were the only people on the trail. I really didn’t want us to get lost or injured up in the snow following some adventurous quack by his footprints alone onto some trail we’ve never seen before. So, like smart people, we turned back. Luckily, the trails are pretty easy to navigate; we’re walking along the ridge of a cliff, more or less. As long as you don’t fall off the cliff or ‘accidentally’ walk over the mountain, you’re pretty much guaranteed to be going the right way.


Behold! Nature!

We walked around for a while and then we passed a waterfall streaming down the hills behind us and Jess got a really big smile on her face. That was really nice. We wander through forests and meadows and up and down really skinny trails cut into steep hillsides for a couple of hours, and then we get to Murren. It’s a tourist hub for the skiiers in the winter and the hikers in the summer. In the middle, when we were there, it’s *empty*. We did manage to track down one restaurant that was open and we refueled for the rest of our day. Our plan was to take the tram (really steep tram) partway up the mountain and then sort of hike back down, but the train was down for repairs so instead, we just got on a tram directly to the summit of the Schilthorn. The live camera on the top indicated that the clouds sort of broke up with enough altitude, so great for us! We got tickets and ascended to the top of the mountain via gondola. Nearly 3000 meters high. Much of the trip was made in the clouds, but that just made it more dramatic when we broke through the clouds and saw the summit and the cool visitors center. It’s a pretty cool place to visit.

We checked out the viewing platform, seeing little mountaintops here and there among the slowly shifting clouds. We also got really entranced by these little black birds that hung out around the platforms and would sort of cavort and dive through the unpredictably shifting winds. The interior of the center held a gift shop (of course) and this weird area where they showed a video with info and history about the mountain and especially about the James Bond movie they filmed up there. It wasn’t one of the good ones, though. When I pushed the button to start the video, all the shades in the room came down automatically. Pretty Bond-esque.


Us on top of the Schilthorn.

We spent a little more time up at the top, marveling at the views (which kept getting better as the clouds slowly cleared) and watching the birds, then took the gondola back down to Murren. We considered walking around on top of the cliff some more, but instead we decided to head back to the valley floor via another gondola, a good 1.5 hour walk from Lauterbrunen. So we did. Back on the valley floor, we took a bus halfway back to Jessie’s favorite sight of the entire vacation. Trummelbach falls.

Trummelbach falls is the results of presumably millions of years of erosion as this river that carries all the water from three glaciers up in the mountains has worn a furrow in the side of the mountain and populated it with a series of spectacular, underground waterfalls. So they built a series of tunnels between the underground waterfalls and lit the whole thing so that you can go inside and see. Let me tell you, it is a sight to behold. Each waterfalls is more spectacular than the last, and they’re all hidden inside this mountain. It’s dark and moist, the sun is visible only through a tiny crack in the stone overhead, and the sound is deafening and refreshing at the same time. We spend probably an hour just wandering through and staring at all these falls and doing our very best to try take pictures in the darkness. It was really cool.


Sorry the lighting is so bad, we were *inside a mountain*.

After that we had some extra time and energy so we walked back to Lauterbrunen. Only about an hour, and thankfully flat. We walked by some cows on the way home and fed them grass and let them lick our hands. Okay, I let them do that. Jess thought it was gross. We met a fellow american traveler there who was nearing the tail end of three months of travel. We helped her take a picture of a cow tongue. City folk.

Back at Lauterbrunen we had fondue for dinner. Jess was super-pumped about this all day, and the cheese was pretty great. We like more variety of stuff to dip in it, they mostly gave us potatoes and bread, but it was still mighty fine cheese. Good beer, too. And ice cream. Heck, anything tastes good when you’ve been hiking all day.


The view from the balcony of our hostel. Best hostel in the world.

We relaxed in our room for a while and I went out on the porch while Jess went to take a shower. Well it turns out that the other great thing about the hostel is that it has very thick windows, so Jess got stuck outside the room for about 15 or 20 minutes while I sat on the balcony and wrote. She got pretty nervous because she couldn’t find me until she thought to yell outside and I heard her from the balcony. I felt bad about that, but no harm was done. We cuddled just fine and slept really well.

-N

Europe Part 4: Chocolate, waffles, and lace.

Having seen the highlight tour of Antwerp, we decided to take a day trip out to Brugge on the second day. Dad Nagles took us to the train station and after putting our newfound train-schedule reading powers to the test we managed to get ourselves to Brugge with very little worry. Our first stop was along a park area, Minnewater Park, complete with old bridges and canals. Very pretty, we took a lot of pictures with the local greenery.


Early spring means Tulip season.

The next impressive sight was waterfowl. The ducks and swans had sort of taken over a bank along one of the canals and we watched them eat and prance around for a while. There were even some baby ducks which, as you might guess, were *so cute*.

At that point we decided to try our first proper Belgian Waffle. (Southern style, not northern). The primary differences between ours and theirs is that theirs isn’t just for breakfast, theirs has crystalized sugar bits in, and theirs is really, really good. Jess really liked it, and we managed to get about 20 feet down the road before Jess decided we needed to get another one.


The 'other' Madonna and Child.

The big church in Brugge is big and old, like most churches, and it’s most famous claim is a Madonna and Child sculpture by Michaelangelo. We saw the sculpture, but actually felt a little bad for *another* Madonna and Child that was really really pretty, but it wasn’t *the* sculpture. Everyone is coming by to see the other statue and no one cares about this really nice one over here. So we took a picture with the ‘other’ one. It was quite pretty.


Seriously weird chocolate. A lot of fun.

The Chocolate line. Called out specifically by our guidebook as one of the stranger chocolate shops, we were intrigued. So we spent probably an hour going into the store, buying really weird chocolates, and writing down our thoughts. Behold some highlights:
-Peanut and Coriander, quite good
-Havana Cigar, technically illegal in the states
-Fried Onions, We really liked this one
-Tomato, olive and basil, tasted like Tomato, olive, basil, and chocolate
-Wasabi, not good
-Saffron Curry, good with white chocolate

We really liked the strangeness and variety. We topped off our chocolate ‘lunch’ with some Belgian fries. Then we completed our walk to the market square (no actual market on that day) where we climbed the bell tower. By hand, even. Or by foot, I guess. Tiny little spiral staircase the whole way. The view from the top was worth it. I like seeing old cities from above.


Us by the statue in market square.

Brugge is full of lace shops. We picked up some for Jessie’s family for souvenirs, and we kept taking Jessie’s picture in front of increasingly large lace shops. We even saw a lace map of the city that was a couple of meters tall at least. Terribly impressive. Then on the way back we saw an old lady doing lace by hand! Her fingers were incredibly deft, and I took a video just so I could remember how cool it was to watch. Triple neato.


Yes, that is Jessie and a lace MAP OF BRUGGE.

We hung out by the ducks and swans for a while, writing in our journals, and then on the way back we saw that there was a carnival set up near the train station. Well we had a little extra time, so we got a ride on the ‘mouse trap.’ Just like a regular roller coaster, except our car spun around while it ran. Pretty cool, though not monumentally exciting.

We caught the train back to Antwerp and then An’s family, being fantastically nice to us *again*, took us out to dinner with the whole family, all three sisters and their husbands/boyfriends. It was fun to watch the conversation flip back and forth between english and dutch. We ate tons and tons of delicious food and drank wine and had a terrific time. We’re hoping An’s famliy can come visit us in Austin sometime so we can return the favor.

So, at the end of a very long day we came back to House Nagles and crashed. Lots of sightseeing for just one day.

-N

I think we're good to go

Yeehaw.

So the skies have cleared, the planes are flying, and it's looking good for our vacation. I suppose something could still go wonky, but that's always a possibility. It's part of the adventure. It's why I wear *adventure pants* when I'm traveling.

They've got lots of pockets.

So yeah, everything is pretty much in place. I'm cycling the music on my I-pod, we have all the chargers and all our clothes selected, and all the adapters to charge everything all over Europe, we hope. We'll take lots of pictures, and I've sworn on my honor as a man that the camera won't get stolen this time, so we can share those when we get back.

My favorite part of the traveling is the journal. Jess had started this, but it's become a nice tradition for us every time we go somewhere interesting. We buy a couple of notebooks, small, with spiral backs and a rubber band to keep it shut, and we take notes about what we did every day. Those things are a blast to look back on, fantastic documentation, and are infinitely helpful when writing blog posts later. I highly recommend them. It's wonderful to back to some of our older ones to see things we've done, emotions we had, and problems we overcame. Consider it a personal travelog, except we're not getting paid to do it. Well, yet, at least. Perhaps someday they will become required reading as 'the artist as a young man'. It's a universe of infinite possibilities out there.

We won't be bringing a laptop, we're traveling super-light, so we'll be mostly incommunicado while we're away. There may be random blog posts or e-mail checking, though, so if we must be reached, you'll be able to figure out how, I should hope.

See you all on the other side.

-N