Dempsey Family Europe 2014 Trip: Interlaken and Surrounding Areas

View of Jungfrau mountain from Interlaken

I must say that Switzerland is by far my favorite country in the world! I love the fact that it is so clean, orderly, and conservation-friendly. For example, they make a lot of power through hydroelectric, but rather than having big dams, they have very small sections where they divert some of the water through pipes to the turbine section and then feed it back into the river using a natural looking chute where you have to look really hard to see that it isn’t part of the natural creek bed. Also, in Horgen they have an incinerator to burn trash, but they use the heat from the incinerator to heat their water and that is where you get hot water from. It’s really neat!

I also love the fact that there are mountains everywhere! I cannot get enough pictures of the mountains (I took roughly 1,700 pictures the two days we were in Interlaken and surrounding areas and 700 on our hike in the mountains from the previous post). We are barely a week into the trip and Erin and I have taken a total of 5,000 photos!

Anyhow, as to what we did in Interlaken, we didn’t really do much of what we’d planned. We got to Interlaken earlier than we planned because we went the route through Luzern, rather than Bern like I had originally planned because Simon said that route was much prettier. I agree! So, we didn’t stop anywhere and got to the hostel before anyone was there to receive us. So, we took our bags back to the train station and crammed all of them into a single large storage locker and then took off to find Reichenbach Falls. We got to the town of Meiringen and walked around. We loved that town! The falls were pretty too! We couldn’t get up to the walkway across the falls because we would have had to take a cable car to the next town up the mountain and hike down. We were still a little sore from our previous Alpine hike, so we decided we didn’t want to hike down another hill. Instead we walked over to the ruin of a castle and took pictures of it (it was just open to the public with a 4-story tower being all that was left. After that we walked by the church and back to the train station. We ate dinner at an Italian restaurant for Erin’s birthday and she got some ice cream mixed with fruit cocktail for dessert.

Erin at the top of the castle

The next day we had wanted to go to Jungfrau which is the biggest mountain by Interlaken, but it was really expensive and it was cloudy (it was supposed to rain, but never did) so we didn’t think it was worth it. So, we decided to go see the Matterhorn instead. But, that didn’t work either because we got to Visp and were going to take the train to Zermatt, but found out that the train to the Matterhorn also cost a lot of money. So, we turned around and headed to Bern to look around. We had fun in Bern walking around and taking photos. We even ate at a Burger King there (which was fairly similar to ours, but not quite the same and definitely more expensive!)

After dinner we headed back and stopped in Spiez, which is a little town Daniel saw when we were changing trains there earlier in the day and he wanted to come back to it. So, we hiked from the train station high on the hill all they way to the lake at the bottom. Another thing about Switzerland that is so amazing is the number of parks and public facilities they have for their residents. Spiez is tiny (maybe 10,000 people), but near the lake they had a mini golf course, swimming pool, basketball court, tennis court, and volleyball court that were all free to use (and they were really nice!). Rather than hike back up the hill, we decided to take a boat back to Interlaken. But, we missed the last boat to Interlaken, so we decided to take the last boat to Thun which is at the other end of the lake. That turned out fine because we were riding into the sunset (lots of great photos) and we met a Swiss couple that was extremely nice!

Erin and Daniel in Spiez

As of right now, we are on a train heading from Interlaken to Avignon, France via Bern, Lausanne, Geneva, and Lyon. We are now back in France and I can clearly tell the difference. I will miss Switzerland and I hope I can go back there in the future!