Grindelwald to Kleine Scheidegg Hike, Switzerland

Whew, I’m in Switzerland! It’s been a couple of years since I’ve been here, and it’s as beautiful as ever. As expensive, too. I’ll just ignore that for the moment. First stop, Grindelwald to see the Eiger and some really big mountains. Unfortunately, it’s raining, but that doesn’t last for long. Our goal the next morning is to climb up to Kleine Scheidegg for the views looking up to the Top Of Europe. The hike starts climbing steeply right from the cog rail station near the river (and luckily near our campground!), and continues in the sunshine past quintessential swiss scenery. Lovely chalets, spring flowers, well-maintained trails, hiking trail signs to everywhere, and snow-capped peaks towering above it all. Not to mention cows wearing bells bigger than my head, ringing so loudly we couldn’t hear ourselves talk.  Oh, and we even got to practice blowing a swiss horn, and milking a cow.  Yeah, it was fun, even if it was only a plastic udder.  And I'm not going to try out for a tuba player anytime soon.

We climbed for a couple of hours in such surrounding to get up to Kleine Scheidegg, which is a mini city inself at the top of the mountain, with a large hotel and a big rail station. It’s the point where many tourists continue on the cog railway up to Jungfraujoch, or the highest glacier in the Alps (at least, where you can take a train to anyway). It was also chilly and almost raining when we arrived, so we felt justified in not having paid an outrageous CHF 177 to go up to a glacier only to be socked into the fog. Anyway, we were feeling spry and decided to continue walking up to the Männlichen cable car stop. We were rewarded with a few minutes of views down into Lauterbrunnen before the fog closed us in. We could have continued down that side of the ridge and taken the bus back to Grindelwald, but it sounded like more fun to walk all the way back down to our campground. Which we did in another couple of hours, for a 7 hour day of walking and about 1000 meters of elevation change. 

Oh, and totally off subject, but we didn't have enough luggage space for camping gear when flying over here, so we purchased stuff when we arrived in Germany. (And already saved enough in hotel bills to pay for the tent, sleeping bags and mattress!?!)  So we got this totally cool tent which unfolds itself in 2 seconds.   Oddly enough, the tent is called the 2 Seconds tent…   It doesn't exactly pack up in that amount of time. but we did manage to wrestle it back into the large circle it originally came in.  In the rain, undo a couple of clips, and voila, the tent flips open and you crawl in.  Now if it only weighed less than a small cow….