Trip to Jungfrau mountain: "The Top of Europe"!

In case you don’t know, Jungfrau is one of the highest mountains in the Alps and it has the highest train station in all of Europe -- it is at 11,000 feet!  (That's why they call it “The Top of Europe”). 

The morning we went to Jungfrau, we had to wake up very early. We got on our train with 30 seconds to spare. (Literally! The guy we got our tickits from said we had 30 seconds to make the train!) The train ride was about 20 minutes long before we had to switch trains at a station. As we kept going up the views became bigger and more spectacular, until the amazing-ness stopped at no trees, grass, or any sort of life.  Here are some views from the train as we started to go up:

We were surrounded by snow, more snow, and tons of mountains completely covered in snow! In the middle of June! It was crazy!  Here's me on the train, bundled up, and the view along the way:

When we entered Jungfraujoch (“joch” means train station), we decided to go first to the “Alpine Delight,” which was basically these really weird sculptures about the Alps (sort of).  From there we went into the “Ice Palace” – that was amazing!  You actually go inside a glacier.  Imagine being in a room completely made out of ice, not a single scrap of wood, bricks, metal or anything like that.  There were sculptures made out of ice, like penguins and bears and wolves, made out of ice, and the floors, walls, and ceilings, were also made of ice.  We were basically inside an ice cube, with mazes and sculptures.  Also, something funny: in one of the walls you could see Scrat, from the Ice Age movies, stuck in the ice with his acorn! 

After we slipped and slided our way through the Ice Palace, we went out on the snow on the “Plateau,” where you could look around the view of snow-covered mountains and play in the snow a little bit.  You had to make sure you didn’t fall off the edge – that could be awful!  The sun was shining, but it was pretty cold and we were all decked out in winter jackets, hats, and mittens.  In June. 

This is the view from the top -- of a giant glacier:

Then we went to the Sphinx -- the observatory station at the very top of Jungfraujoch.  This is what it looks like (from a postcard):

From up there, you could see mountains in almost every direction.  It’s almost every because on one side you could see little towns down below in the valley – you couldn’t even really tell which was Grindelwald.

After a good Indian lunch in the station, we went on to my favorite part of the day – “Snow Fun”!  This was completely out in the snow, on a hill underneath the mountains, with lots of activities: “tubing” (where you ride down a fast track in a tire thingy), “sledging” (sledding down a steep hill), skiing, snowboarding, and so on. 

First we did something called a “Fox Flyer,” which was a huge zip-line over the Alps.  You climb up a huge ladder on the cliff, a guy puts you in a harness, and then pushes you off the cliff and you zip through open snowy air until you cross over the “snow fun” area and then crash into the snow on the other end.  You didn’t stop slowly at all – you just crash and burn.  It was so much fun!  All four of us did it and we all loved it.  Here are videos of us actually zipping on the zip line!

!

Here I am with Dylan just after the zip cord:

Then Dad and I did a lot of tubing.  Luckily none of us got stuck in spots where you could get crashed into by people behind you.  It went pretty fast down a tobogganish (is that a word?) track.  Sometimes you could even catch air!  Then we tried sledding for a long time too.  It was a really quick, steep downhill path and it was really fun.  I got crashed into by one guy who was out of control and barely got missed by another. 

 

Another view of the mountains:

After that awesome day, we left Jungfrau and took the long train down the mountain back to Grindelwald.  It was an amazing, adventure-filled day!

Lucerne to Grindelwald, Switzerland

We got a great breakfast at a café, and Dylan and I fed some sparrows on some steps where we had a picnic.  Aftewards, we walked up to see the old city wall and towers that were overlooking Lucerne. 

We climbed up to the top of two, one small and one big, and the bigger one had clock gears in it and pendulums and that was really cool. 

We walked back down along the city wall and went back to the hotel to pack up and leave Lucerne.

We took two amazing trains to Grindelwald, a village way up in the Alps.  There were waterfalls and mountains, waterfalls IN mountains, and huge snow-capped stony structures (also known as mountains – I didn’t want to write mountains so many times!).  This is from the train ride into Grindelwald:

We got to Grindelwald and were presented with four ginormous mountains right in front of us – Eiger, Wetterhorn, Shreckhorn, and I don’t remember (nice name, eh?).  The view from the hotel was spectacular.  They gave us a fruit bowl.  And chocolates.

Then we went on our first cable car up to Pfingstegg, a stop pretty high up the mountain called (I don’t remember).  

There was a little playground up there with another trampoline – I think that’s a thing in Switzerland: putting trampolines on top of mountains!  We had a little snack on the deck with an amazing view:

 and then rode back down, and later had dinner at the nice Italian restaurant on the deck outside behind our hotel, right underneath the giant mountains:

The view from dinner!

New email address, more posts to come!

Hi everyone -
Sorry I haven't put up a blog post in a while.  We've been really busy getting settled in Florence!  I'll post something soon about the rest of our stay in Switzerland.  In the meantime, I wanted to let you know that something weird happened to my AOL email account and I can't get into it.

So I just got a new Gmail email address.  From now on, my address is:
cregmusic4058@gmail.com

Please email me at my new address!  Hope you're all doing well!

This is where I'm sitting right now, on our balcony, in Florence, Italy!!

Day 4: Mt. Rigi

The morning we climbed Mt. Rigi we got up early.  We went to the boat that would take us to Mt Rigi – the boat ride was amazingly scenic, even more beautiful than we expected and our expectations were high!  There were tons of snow-capped mountains in the distance, such as the Alps and we could see Mt Rigi and Mt Pilatus looming over us.  To top it all off, the weather was beautiful.  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky (well, almost).  When we got to the Vitznau, we waited and then got on the train.   The train was amazing!  It had open windows, so I was afraid we could fall out the windows as we went up.  It was really steep and was at something like a 50% angle, which is very steep!  The views as you went up were breathtaking.  You could see the mountains even closer than before and you could also see the whole of Lake Lucerne with all the mountains surrounding it, which was completely WOW.  You could see the people who live up on the mountain, near the top, and that was really cool.  At one stop, we saw a young boy in a traditional Swiss outfit carrying eggs.  He got on the train and we thought he was maybe bringing eggs to someone who lived closer to the top.  It was really cool imagining someone whose life was so different than ours.

We got to the top, which had even the best views of all.  I felt like I was on top of the sky!  We walked over to this huge antennae radio tower thingy and climbed it to the highest point we could get to, which was the highest point of Mt Rigi, which I found pretty cool.  We had a picnic snack at the top, on some green grass which was covered with pretty flowers, and an amazing view of all the Alps.  Suddenly we heard this loud but beautiful noise and we turned and saw these two people playing the longest horns you’ll ever see – really!  They were like 15 feet long!  They played some somber pretty songs, which sounded like we were at a funeral.  We found out later that these instruments were called alphorns. We hiked down Mt. Rigi for a while, until we got to our next stop with a restaurant and a playground. At the playground, they actually had a trampoline!  It seemed really weird and cool to jump on a trampoline on top of a big mountain in Switzerland.  We jumped on the trampoline for a bit, ate lunch on the deck, and jumped some more.

Then we hiked some more for a long-ish time, until we got to the cable car place. There was a few fast downhill spots on it- those were fun. We left Mt. Rigi and got back on our boat to Lucerne. We stumbled on big festival, with ethnic food and kid games with stilts, a weird bouncy ball thing, and an awesome but REALLY weird ball contraption thingy. We had dinner at La Bonne Cave, a nice restaurant. It was a great, fun-filled day!

On the boat to Mt. Rigi.

Here is a house near the top of the mountain where people lived.

The top of Mt. Rigi!

We thought this was a funny sign -- how do you say "mmhhh"?   "Mmm-huh?"  And what is "lecker"?

Day 3

We woke up and had a delicious traditional Swiss breakfast at our hotel. There were croissants, Swiss cereal, weird hard-boiled eggs with red and yellow speckled shells, and "The best cheese in the world!," said my brother, the food critic. It was amazing! We walked around the streets of Zurich for an hour or so, until we found a viewpoint on a hill over looking Zurich. It was beautiful! 

Somehow, we stumbled across a playground with weird Swiss equipment. Traveling in foreign countries is really fun, but it can be scary too, like our experience in the bathroom at Zurich's 64th playground (for some reason the playgrounds are numbered there!). Imagine a completely metal bathroom with a big huge bowl for the toilet and a black metallic seat with metal bars connecting it to the walls which you can push up and down.  Imagine all the walls covered with weird buttons with signs and symbols on them, such as a button inscribed with a picture of a needle, a button with a hair-dryer,and even a button with a picture of a shower! I wasn’t sure how to flush it becase none of the buttons looked right except for maybe the shower one and I didn’t want to take chances. So I opened the door and at the moment I opened it there was this HUGE, loud sound and water came flooding into the giant bowl and the black seat suddenly swung up and almost hit me in the head. It was the craziest bathroom ever! 

 After that we went back to our hotel to leave for the train to Lucerne. We arrived in Lucerne and quickly found our hotel, Mr Pickwick, a weird British pub and hotel (one that mom and dad happened to stay in 20 years ago when they visited Lucerne!). You checked in at the bar instead of in a lobby!  While we were checking in Dylan and I got to play darts -- I was actually really good at it!  After resting, we ate lunch and walked across the famous Chapel Bridge, which was built 700 years ago.  It is a covered wooden bridge with beautiful paintings transcribing life in Lucerne from hundreds of years ago. We explored for a while more and then we got tired and went home to rest a bit. Later we had dinner at the Italian restaurant right by the river – I had pizza and spaghetti. It was delicious! It was another great day.

Yellow speckled egg:

 We saw these pigeons drinking water from this fountain -- some even formed a line to wait for their turn!

 This was the view from our hotel room window in Lucerne:

 This was also the view from our hotel room window -- we could see the famous covered bridge and Mt. Pilatus:

 Another view from the hotel:

In front of the covered bridge:

 Lucerne at sunset:

Day 1 and Day 2

The reason I'm putting day 1 and 2 in the same post is that the two days seemed so blurred together, they seemed like the same day. DAY 1: At 11:00 A.M. on Wednesday, my awesome babysitter, Miss Mary, dropped us off at the Tallahassee Airport. Soon we got on our flight to Atlanta, Georgia. At 4:40, we got on our flight to Zurich, Switzerland.It was NINE HOURS LONG! One thing you should know: the time difference between the U.S.A. and Switzerland is about six hours! The airplane had movie screens every few seats (AWESOME)! First Journey 2:The Mysterious Island played, and then We Bought a Zoo. At about 7:00 P.M. (U.S.A. time), we were served dinner. It was actually quite good. Sometime around there (I don't remember when) I fell asleep until 10:00 P.M.(Also U.S. time), and I couldn't fall back asleep. So, I got three hours of sleep. DAY 2: At 5:00 A.M. (Switzerland time) or 11:00 P.M.(U.S. time) , we were served breakfast. I didn't eat much. This meal was not as great as dinner. At 7:00 A.M., or 2:00 A.M., we landed in Switzerland! Coolest landing EVER! There was a huge sea of clouds as we landed. There were so many clouds you couldn't see the ground! (And I mean that literally!)And we could see the alps in the distance! It was just WOW. Our hotel room at Hotel Hirschen, the oldest hotel in Zurich, wouldn't be ready for a few hours. So we did the natural thing: explored, and tried to find breakfast. After we explored for an hour, we got breakfast at an amazing Swiss cafe. My brother (Dylan) and I split a croissant and a brioche. My favorite part was the amazing hot chocolate. It was my favorite EVER! Afterwards we went to our hotel room and relaxed for a bit. Dylan liked watching his favorite shows in German. Later, we explored some more, and went inside the two main churches: Grossmunster (Gross-monster) and Fraumunster (Frow-monster), They were beautiful! Then we went on an amazing boat ride around Lake Zurich (very original name, huh?)for an hour and a half. Switzerland's also know for it's chocolate, so we got some. BEST CHOCOLATE IN THE WORLD! We explored a bit more, then went to a great art museum, the Kunsthaus (Koons-hows). It means "Art House". Then we ate dinner, and came back to our hotel. It was a great, very long, very fun first day!