We Take Ourselves With Us

 One last morning in Interlaken, and we bid Auf  Wiedersehen to our lovely river view and to the more German part of Switzerland. We were off for Lausanne, from which one can literally see France across Lake Geneva.   We hopped a train for the couple hour trip, which took us from the Alps through beautiful Swiss farmlands.   Ned had read that newcomers to Lausanne should avoid driving at all costs--the roads are confusing, the signage equally so, and the entire town rises from the lake on steep, steep hills. Well, after exiting the train station in the wrong direction, and finding ourselves pulling heavy luggage up cobblestone hills and then staircases that never ended--and getting pooped on by a bird and losing a suitcase wheel--we decided that newcomers to Lausanne should avoid walking at all costs. Then, it started to drizzle. But, eventually, we found our home for the next two nights, the Hotel de la Paix, and it became very clear why all that walking was importa...

 We had one goal for the day: get to the top of Europe, aka Jungfraujoch. It is home to the highest railroad station in Europe, taking visitors far up into the Alps. Our journey for the day would involve several trains and a gondola--and making all of them required spot-on timing. Luckily, the Celtics won their game seven, so Penn--who had been up from 2:30 am to about 5 am--was tired but happy to go. We were off. The train climbed higher and higher, eventually dropping us at a transfer station to catch the Eiger Express. This gondola--as the name suggests--zips visitors up the mountain and alongside the Eiger, which rises over 13,000 feet in the Bernese Alps. The views--as we had come to expect in the Berner Oberland region--were beautiful as far as the eye could see, made even moreso by the absence of any obstructions as we floated along. You can see the shadow of our gondola in one of the photos below.   And here we are inside:   We sailed up among the very tops of the...