Home » Switzerland » Hiking tour in Switzerland [2]

My watch died overnight. Guess I can only find out what time it is by being nice to Jacky. It wasn’t raining when we got up...

Hiking tour in Switzerland [2]

Dave Hood
2004-02-22 18:16:20

Displayed times (last time: )

pizza restaurant, went inside just as the rain started in earnest. Are we living right, or what? I kept burning myself on the pizza – Jacky was ok. I figure I must be more delicate, more sensitive, than she. We heard the waitress talking with some other customers about Americans who come here on Urlaub. Now, how do you suppose she knew?

And by the time we had eaten our pizza, the rain had quit, so we wandered the town for a few minutes before catching the train. Met one of the trekkies who’s staying here tonight instead of going back to Thun. Good-bye, good luck. Stopped at a sporting goods store, where they sold me a single long yellow bootlace for my hat. Looks funny, but then so does the hat. And the guy wearing it, too, for that matter. After a while it will just look ratty, and that will fit right in as well.

And there was a high-resolution topo map of the area on display at a kiosk. There are two Nassbergs! Five kilometers apart! And my topo map only shows the name for one of them, the wrong one of course. So we were right – the map was wrong!

Bought a loaf of Nußbrot to have munchies on tomorrow’s train home. We’d rather not pay the prices at the dining car.

We saw a blue heron from the Lenk train, which is more an extended streetcar than a train. It makes an hourly milk run to Zweisimmen, where we changed to another milk run that took us to Spiez, where we got onto the milk run that took us to Thun. The valley from Lenk to Spiez is full of lumber mills. From the piles stacked in their yards, they would seem to produce a lot of rough-cut lumber – but maybe the finished lumber isn’t stored outdoors.

We each have a single train ticket, with a long list of destinations and transfer points. The train from Lenk was, de facto, honor system. On the train from Zweisimmen, the guard studied the tickets and punched them. On the train to Thun, the guard looked at them, his eyes crossed, he shrugged, smiled, handed them back, went on.

Thun was familiar – a town we remember visiting once before, many lifetimes ago. The desk clerk at the Elite hotel recognized us when we came in, and gave us the same room as before. Swiss attention to detail. Dinner was good: more pup-dog filets for Jacky. They garnished the entrées with onion sprouts – what a great idea! Said good-bye to those of our other hiking companions who happened to be in the dining room, and went out for a slow peaceful stroll around the town.

Saturday, September 9, to München
With a 7:44 train, a 7:00 breakfast was a little tense. We went down at 6:45; all the food was there, and we did fine. Same train, same seats, all the way to München. No adventures. Nice to be home.