I’m back! Most of you already know this, but back in May I went to the US for what was planned as a 3 week visit. I was looking forward to being back in Switzerland in mid-June, right before we had visitors on our schedule. However there was a change of plan when my dog Bernie got injured and needed surgery to repair an ACL tear (known as a CCL tear in dogs), so my 3 week trip became to a 6 week trip. I was able to get back to Switzerland in the middle of the visits, but we’ve been going non-stop since. The last people left yesterday, so I can start sharing some trips on this blog again!

The travel planets aligned, and this hiking trip occurred while we actually had 3 groups of visitors - oldest daughter and boyfriend, middle daughter and niece, and Cass’s high school BFF and his wife. Blake and Suzan actually planned this hiking location for their trip, and we just invited ourselves along so we could spend a little more time with them. We took trains to Mürren on Saturday July 9 Zürich > Bern > Interlaken Ost > Lauterbrunnen > Mürren. Mürren is one of those mountain villages that is not particularly accessible by car, so you have to take a gondola and mountain train from Lauterbrunnen. These photos are our arrival to Mürren, the view from the Hotel Jungfrau (which does not take online reservations, phone calls only bitte!), and the golden hour views in Mürren. It really does look like that here, and honestly the pictures do not fully capture the reality.

Time to get up and hike! After snapping some morning-of-hiike views from the hotel room windows (Guten Morgen, Katze!) we had breakfast at the hotel, then started out to find the Northface trail, named for the views you get of the north faces of some of the Bernese Alps. People on this hike: me, Cass, oldest daughter Cami, her boyfriend Max, and niece Noelle. Blake and Suzan hiked up to the top of Schilthorn.

Last season we didn’t even start hiking until late August, so apparently we didn’t even know we missed out on the best part of summer hikes - wildflowers! They were everywhere, and I don’t know what kind any of them were but they were awesome. We also got to see some cows and even walk through their pasture while it was nap time. Shhh.

Yes, it really looks like this, and yes it makes you want to twirl around and sing songs from The Sound of Music (Noelle). One of the mountain restaurants we passed had pigs and chickens, so we got to add those to the list of animals-we’ve-seen-on-a-hike. And right at the end of the loop on our way back down to Mürren, we got to see a guy trying to take off with a parasail. We saw him catch an updraft, but then he didn’t take off and had to bail out start all over. We didn’t stick around for that. There were LOTS of parasailers to watch though.

After the hike, we had smoothies and desserts. And on the way to the train station, we found some actual Edelweiss in a planter outside of a hotel. That was our first actual sighting of it in Switzerland!

We got back down to Lauterbrunnen and walked through to go see the Staubbach waterfall, because when you’ve just finished a hike what you want to do is walk some more, right? When we got there, you could walk up about a million stairs to go see the waterfall close up. Sure, let’s do that! We were a little (A LOT) disappointed that the waterfall was having a bad day and there was no actual water to be seen from the close-up location at the top of the million stairs that we climbed up for no reason. I was so tired, I had given up on good photography at that point, so you can’t really tell how massive the waterfall really is. It’s really cool, just plan to go see it before you hike. Or on a different day altogether.

Mürren was cool, and the Northface hike was one of the best hikes we’ve done, so it’s on the list to go back when we need a nice, easy hike.