We slept in a bit this morning, and didn’t get out of bed until 10:00 — it was wonderful! Breakfast is included at Hotel Staubbach, so we hurried down before it ended at 10:30 for ham, cheese, breads, cereal, yogurt, juice, and coffee. We were full and ready to face a day of exploring.
We put on our hiking clothes and headed out to see the waterfalls. Trummelbachfall is only about a 45 minute walk away, but with us stopping every few minutes to take pictures, greet cows/sheep/goats, pet cats, watch base jumpers and skydivers, it took us about 2 hours — ha!
Trummelbachfalls is a set of waterfalls that flow inside of the mountain. It is the only one accessible anywhere in Europe. There is a lift to take us about halfway up in the mountain, then the rest is done with stairs. It was pretty cool (literally, too), I recommend it. Except that there were a ton of tourist buses arriving, and it was crowded with these groups. I hate these groups, they move around like a herd and make it hard to get around or enjoy the beauty. And funny enough, I recognized a few people from a tour group we saw yesterday at Castle Chillon (dyed-bright-red-but-obvious-grey-hair lady is hard to miss).
Walking back from the falls, we saw some pretty amazing jumpers. A helicopter had dropped off a group on top of a cliff, and these guys just jumped off, free-falling right in front of us for about 10 secondes before pulling the parachute. You could really hear the “rip” sound when the chute caught the air. Then, moments later, we could hear shots ringing through the valley as locals practiced target shooting right in the valley next to the road. Very loud and a little startling as it echoed against the granite mountains, Kevin and I agreed that open shooting so close to tourists would not likely happen in the US. We joked that it was a good thing they didn’t start shooting one minute earlier, as the cliff jumpers might have also been startled and missed pulling their chutes in time.
We had dinner at Hotel Oberalp tonight. Again, a very good dinner, probably the best yet. Kevin had the ribeye, I had the mushroom tortellini. We both had green salads which are so good here, everything is so fresh, with homemade dressing. I finished off with the apple strudel - yum.
We are still unable to find a place to connect my USB drive to upload pictures. All the public computers, all over town, are locked in boxes so that you cannot reach them, and are coin operated. It is 5 CHF per 25 mins, so very expensive. I’ve spent about 13CHF so far just for writing these blog posts, and am getting the 3-minute warning right now.
Tomorrow we drive across Switzerland again, to Bellinzona to see the castles there, then on to Lugano for the night.
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