Swiss Alps!

WOW! What a day. Craig and I decided to take a “little” hike yesterday. It turned out to be a little bit more than a “little” hike. The signs on the path said “easy trail and sport trail” always pointing in the same direction so we didn’t really have a choice. We quickly learned that getting anywhere in Switzerland will have to be either straight up or straight down. I have forgotten the formula for figuring out gradients so, you will just have to take my word for it, it was super steep. We left Grindelwald and headed for the trail. It was about 1 hour and 20 minutes of straight up, with a few rests in between, but the view was my “dangling carrot”. I need these carrots when exercising; I love the treadmill because it is constantly giving me my much needed positive reinforcement, in the form of calories burned, miles gained and most importantly time remaining. So, we continued up and up and up. After about an hour, Craig gave me the ultimate reinforcement “ok mud, when we get up to that point, we can take the gondola the rest of the way.” YES! So we took the gondola for what would’ve been another two hours of uphill-upmountain hiking. We arrived at the top and started up towards the lake. After soaking through shoes and socks and freezing toes and more snow further ahead and a tantalizing coffee spot, I decided to allow Craig the joy of hiking alone for another 50 minutes to the lake, I enjoyed my hike to the warm restaurant and warm latte in hand. As you can see, Craig got some amazing pictures of the lake, incredible reflection shots. He returned after about 2 hours and we headed down, no gondola this time. We started our descent at about 4pm and finished at 7:30pm, not stopping a ton, except for a couple of serious photo sessions. We were definitely hurting by the time we got down, but what a day, we couldn’t have asked for better view, while we went up, the clouds were covering everything and we were a little bummed, thankfully only a few hours later, it all cleared up and it was absolutely majestic. Enjoy the photos, video coming soon.