The Top of Europe and, The Waterfly

April 28, 2012
Today is Nika's birthday and she had made special plans to go to the top of Europe.  The top of Europe is a place called Jungfrau and is almost literally the top of Europe!  That's all I'll say about it for now because, unfortunately we don't have any pictures to support it.  We don't have any pictures because, apparently on a rare occasion it is too windy for the train to take us there.  Guess what?  Today was one of those windy days that was too windy for the train to travel there.  Those special plans had to be postponed.

"The waterfall that is a waterfly" is Nika's translation.  If you have been reading these blogs you know that we are in the valley of 72 waterfalls.  The water from the waterfalls that we can see from our hotel balcony are not waterfalls this evening.  They are instead, waterfly's because the same wind that kept us from the top of Europe is keeping waterfalls from reaching the ground.  There is a waterfall within view of our hotel balcony that has snow at its' base where it reaches the ground.  As we drove through town tonight, we saw that the water is not reaching the ground and thus, Nika said "It's a waterfly!"

 Instead of the top of Europe, we drove to the Capitol of Switzerland.  That means we went to the City of Bern.  One of the stories of how the town of Bern was named goes like this.  The founder of the city vowed to name the city after the first animal he met on the hunt.  This turned out to be a bear.  Once in Bern, we walked around the historical part of Bern that dates back to the 1220's.  On one end of this historical part of Bern is an area called Barengraben or, aka: Bear Pit.  In the Barengraben there are bears...brown bears!

Bern seems to be a very fashionable city.  We enjoyed our afternoon in Bern that included seeing the bears, walking along the Aar River, watching kids in a soapbox derby and walking through the markt grasse, also known as market street.

Overall it was a 45 minute to one hour drive each way from Lauterbrunnen.  A nice and easy scenic drive that, in part, goes along Lake Thunersee (Lake Thun).