On our second and last day in Switzerland we awoke to gorgeous blue skies! :) So we hopped out of bed, made a quick stop at the bakery, and headed towards the train station! We took a train up to the village of Wengen, and then a cable car up the mountain and began hiking! We took a trail that went just along the mountain ridge-line, and gave an amazing view of the “three peaks”… The tallest being the Jungfrau…
The hike took us a good portion of the morning and afternoon, but only because we stopped so often to take in the view… Or drag my mother away from talking to the cows! :) The weather was perfect, and we found a great little place looking out over the three peaks to stop for a picnic lunch of fresh brot, Swiss cheese, and Swiss chocolate… Yum!
It was truly amazing to realize how much of the Alps you can’t take in from the valley… As in we literally could not see them! From the our guesthouse in Lauterbrunnen it seemed as if they stretched on forever, and we marveled at watching the clouds move, revealing a new peak… They just kept appearing from thin air… But we really had no perception of how massive they truly were from the valley… On the train and cable car up, they just kept unraveling before our eyes… And just when we thought we’d reached the highest peak another would appear… So it was truly amazing to stand atop the ridgeline and realize the Lauterbrunnen was so far below that we could hardly spot it! :) It was definitely an amazing experience, and one we nearly all voted as our “favorite” since moving to Europe over a year ago!
Picniking along the way… :) Fresh brot, Swiss cheese, meat, and Swiss chocolate… It doesn’t get any better!
We left Lauterbrunnen later that afternoon, tired but rejuvenated from an amazing day atop the Alps… But little did we know that our Swiss adventure wasn’t quite over yet!
We hadn’t headed down the road more than 20 minutes before two things became very obvious: 1) we were driving to Italy on the curviest, steepest, tightest mountain road we’d seen yet and 2) we were frighteningly low on gas! We finally reached the top of a never-ending uphill chain of mountains, and just when we could go no higher our “gas light” turned bright red in warning… Despite looking for a gas stop for the last half hour, there was not a single town or even house in sight… If we broke down up here there would be no help until we had hiked to an SOS phone (that we passed every few miles)…
Roadside pull-off at the top of the never-ending mountain road… Where we stopped to desperately search the map for the nearest town before the gas completely ran out! Haha
Part of the ridiculous winding Swiss roads…
Gas on empty, gas-light on, and car in neutral!
Luckily we had reached the top, so we put the van in neutral and coasted all the way down the mountain riding the brakes! We must have coasted for 30km before we rolled right into a little town and the only gas station for miles… And just in time!
After that, the rest of the trip seemed relatively mundane… Although we did spend a considerable amount of time driving under mountains and through tunnels… In fact, between Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland and Lago di Garda, Italy we went through 47 tunnels! One of which, at 17km long, was the longest tunnel in the world! Pretty impressive Swiss engineering!
So in retrospect, I guess you could say that we spent the day going over, under, and through the Swiss Alps! :)
With Love from a windy road in the Swiss Alps… <3 Mary Elizabeth
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