Our Trip to Europe

Day 32 – Cinque Terre to Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland.

We had another early morning as we have an 8-9 hour drive today. We walked to the train station, took the train back to Levanto and met up with Alfonso and the bus there. We stopped at another Auto Grill for lunch except this one was operated by another company. The restaurant was really nice and they have so much freshly made food to choose from in these things it is unbelievable. They actually bake their own bread here.

The ride into Lauterbrunnen was twisty and several people on the bus were having problems with car sickness. I happened to get a front seat where I could look out the front windshield so I didn’t have a problem. The countryside was beautiful and we started to see the snow covered mountains. The buildings were mostly stone on the bottom and timber on the top and again, we see lots of flower boxes at the windows.

We arrived in Lauterbrunnen late in the afternoon. Our hotel is an old Swiss looking building with no air conditioning and lots of stairs. Our room was on the third floor which was a bit of a challenge as I am hauling all the luggage to try and help with Paul’s back. He is doing better today and we want to keep it that way.

After dumping our luggage in our room, we took off to see the town. There is a huge waterfall very close to the hotel and we walked up there to take pictures of it. Our group had dinner together tonight in the hotel. Their specialty is cheese fondue. They prepared a couple of large pots of the fondue for our group and we all got up to try it. We dipped chunks of bread from the local bakery in the cheese and it was very good. Since we are in the German speaking part of Switzerland we had SAUSAGE!! and something called a “rosti” which is basically a big hash brown patty with gravy for dinner. Switzerland is kind of divided into three sections – Italian, German and French. They do have a language of their own, not Swiss, that is only spoken in more remote areas of the country and usually by the older generation only.

After dinner, Paul and I walked up to the waterfall, Staubbach Waterfall, again to take more pictures as it is lit up at night. Once we got our pictures, we headed off to bed. We noticed that the floor in our room slanted and the head of the bed went downhill. We decided to sleep in the other direction. It is fairly warm here so we left the doors onto the patio open for the night to keep things cool. Also, they don’t use top sheets in Europe so the only thing you can cover up with is like a duvet which is pretty heavy unless it is a cool night.