On A Grand Tour

The only way to decide where to go first when you have an entire country to explore is to take your travel book, close your eyes, flip to a page, and go! In our case, our chosen first weekend adventure in our new country was Lauterbrunnen, located in the Bernese Oberland, nestled in a glacial valley surrounded by alpine peaks. Sounds great!

Kurt has been working late and overnight shifts at work, so true to just about every trip we’ve ever taken, we started our weekend sleep-deprived. With only one hour of sleep, we hopped on the train headed towards central Switzerland. Halfway through the 3.5 hour train ride, it dawned on us that we were heading into the German-speaking part of the country. After all of our French learning, we hadn’t thought about learning the key German words and phrases to make traveling and communicating easier. Our first crash course in our very poor German came with our last train transfer in Interlaken. After hopping off the train in Interlaken West and looking around for our next train, we realized that there was a crucial word at the end of our correct transfer station – Ost – which we learned means “East” in German. Oops! Missteps often lead to unexpected fun though, and our walk across town from West to Ost allowed us to experience Interlaken and watch the hang gliders landing in the park.

On to our final destination, Lauterbrunnen. I felt like a kid in an amusement park as our train entered the valley, so beautifully green with sheer cliff walls rising on each side and snowy peaks in the background. It was here that we made our most crucial decision of the weekend. Instead of having a mellow day on the valley floor as intended due to our lack of sleep, we decided to take advantage of the blue skies and get up to altitude. Best decision ever, since the following day was foggy and rainy and would not have allowed for amazing mountain views.

Lauterbrunnen, pictures and words just don’t do you justice! The wooden chalets, the flower boxes in every window in sight, the backdrop of waterfalls and cliffsides and more picturesque towns perched high on the cliffs. The train dropped us off right in the middle of town and we were just steps away from Valley Hostel, where we stayed for the weekend. Located right in the middle of town, it was a great place to stay, and we had views of waterfalls out all of our windows.

Next, we pointed ourselves in the direction of the mountains and started walking. The altitude of the town of Wengen, our first goal, didn’t look too high from the valley floor. That “not so high” town turned into a two hour straight-up ascent, which on one hour of sleep was a little extra difficult. Thank goodness we only entertained hiking the next leg, from Wengen to Männlichen, another 3,000 foot steep ascent, for about one second before deciding to take the gondola up.

From our birds-eye perch on Männlichen, we could see out to the lakes of Interlaken, down the entire Lauterbrunnen valley, to the neighboring valley and town of Grindelwald, and up to the peaks of Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau. Every direction you look could be its own postcard. Since it was our first trip into this area, we figured that hiking a trail with a name like “Panoramaweg” seemed appropriate, and we were not wrong. Alpine beauty everywhere you look!

The most beautiful stretch of the trail took us parallel to the three side-by-side peaks. We had front-row views of the glaciers, crashing waterfalls, and craggy rock formations. We took a break for snacks and views on a bench directly facing what were by now our favorite mountain peaks. A couple of stubborn clouds were obscuring the very tops of the mountains at this point, but we decided that we could get them to move from their inconvenient location by sheer willpower if we just waited long enough. Sure enough, as the golden afternoon continued, the clouds started to break up. It was then that, in Kurt’s words, he performed “the most important single-leg squat” of his life. While I thought that we were simply taking a picture in front of the now-visible Mönch, Kurt was actually getting set up for an amazing proposal. Somehow he managed to time the cloud movement with telepathic pleas to any other hikers to stay off our portion of the trail, while positioning me so that he would not be forced to kneel in a cow patty (!!!) and setting up the video camera. All with me being none the wiser. And he pulled off an amazing proposal that consisted of just us and the gorgeous Alpine peaks above us. Big surprise, I said “YES!”

Of course, in true Kurt and Alyssa fashion, we enjoyed ourselves so much that we missed the last train of the evening down the mountain, which meant that we got to hike all the way back down. Honestly, we weren’t mad about it. Despite sore toes and quads from the steep and long descent, the golden afternoon glow just meant more beautiful vistas to see.

Finally back in Lauterbrunnen, we finished up our long, exhausting, and perfect day with a celebratory dinner at the The Bell Restaurant and said “Cheers!” in the shadow of Lauterbrunnen’s most famous waterfall. What a day!