Hiking: Schynige Platte to First

Another gorgeous day, another hike through the gorgeous Swiss countryside. We woke up early Saturday morning and took over 4 hours of trains and buses to get up to Schynige Platte where we started our 9-mile hike. From the beginning we had a perfect view of the three big mountains Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau.



And we saw more cows:



The hike was fairly flat for the first half, with a view of mountains with glaciers to our right and gorgeous blue-green lake Brienz to our left. All of the lakes and rivers in Switzerland have this amazing color to them due to the minerals in the glacier water that feeds them:





We took a lot of good pictures of all the scenery on this hike, too many to post here. We also stopped at the usual restaurant in the middle of the mountains for a refreshing beverage halfway through the hike but I didn't take any pictures of it which is very unusual for me. But rest assured that this hike was not missing the usual restaurant!





There were so many glaciers on this hike! I love glaciers.



We ended the hike at the top of a gondola that we took down into Grindelwald where our hotel was for the night. But at the gondola station there was a group of goats hanging out begging for food. They were pretty funny, but I can only say that because I didn't have any food so they didn't pester me too much.



This guy was my favorite. Half black, half white, and super shaggy:



Our hotel room in Grindelwald had a great view of the Eiger, though it was encased in clouds most of the time:



We got a better picture of the Eiger the next morning:



On Sunday we took a train to Interlaken and wandered around there a bit since Martin and I had never been there before. Then we took a boat to Thun and had lunch there, then headed back to Zürich. While we were on the boat to Thun there was a group of accordionists playing for us:



And here's a picture of one of the bridges in Thun. The flowers on the bridges were beautiful - wish mine would look like that. There was also a castle in Thun but we didn't have time to see it. You can see the top of it in the upper left of the picture below. Thun seemed like a neat place to spend an afternoon wandering around.



People were surfing on the waves that came under the bridges here which was fun to watch. The waves in the picture above aren't that great but one of the other bridges created really big waves.