Today was a day I had been looking forward to since I first started looking at things to do in Grindelwald over two years ago! Today we were off to walk the trail between two mountain peaks. Meant to be an easy 1 1/2 hour descent through alpine meadows strewn with flowers and cows (and cow pats). Sounds great hey?

But like all great plans, a spanner was thrown in the works .... in this case Mother Nature had other ideas and had dumped an awful lot of snow on the mountains recently meaning the path was closed.  

At first we thought, "well we walked through all the snow from Lake Bachalpsee a couple of days ago.. how hard can it be"? But then we got to the top of Mannlichen and were told it was closed due to avalanche risk. Oh, ok... that's a different story! We could see some parts of the trail where little avalanches had already covered the path to quite a height, so for once we did the sensible thing and listened (even Jeff!). It happens sometimes!

Jeff's day started with a walk around Grindelwald, following a stream down to the floor of the valley then a little road back up the other side ... because he reckons he doesn't get enough hiking with us ... lunatic! For the normal people, our day started a little earlier than usual with all of us out of the house and on the road by 9:30am . Our first stop was the cable car station at Grindelwald Grund to to take a small gondola up to Mannlichen.

Quite a nice ride over fields and forest and walking trails. As usual on any cable car trip we all played "spot the marmot" and were rewarded with several sightings. They're industrious little diggers - though we'd all prefer it if they didn't undermine the concrete support bases of the cable car towers!

At Mannlichen we immediately put on jackets as it was a little chillier up there. Not really surprising seeing there was lots of snow around and we were at 2227m above sea level.

With our plans to do the peak to peak walk thwarted, we eagerly (Bev says... "eagerly?? really??") looked around for something else to climb and ah-ha! Our eagle-eyes (blind Freddy could have seen it ...) quickly narrowed in on the summit trail. A trifling 120m elevation gain - easy as pie!

The trail looped up the hill with lovely views on either side and of course multitude scatterings of alpine flowers everywhere there wasn't snow or rocks or path.  

The last part of the summit trail was rather steep with lots of loose shale type rock which made things a bit trickier, but we all made it to the top with the assistance of the rope railing and the odd helping hand now and again .

And it was well worth it with amazing views down both the Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen valleys from the summit. Really quite spectacular and awe inspiring. We all gasped at the beauty (or possibly gasping to get our breath back).

After admiring the view, chatting with the other Aussies up there, and taking silly selfies we carefully walked back down and became totally obsessed with playing in the amongst the alpine flowers. OK, maybe it was just me who became obsessed with them... but they're so pretty! I loves them.

Next we rode a cable car down to the hilltop village of Wengen in the Lauterbrunnen valley. Again, quite a pretty little mountain town but not an awful lot open. We had a look around, said Hi to the bell wearing sheep, and the bell wearing church, then picked a non-bell-wearing Italian restaurant (surprise surprise!) for lunch. The owner very helpfully took our photo so we didn't have to do the selfie thing (even though he nearly crippled himself doing it) .

Bev made a cracker of a comment about her pizza at lunch, and I quote:
"I never realised how big 9 inches was"
 
Much smirking and suppressed laughter at the table from me, Jeff & Jill. Bless her naive little cotton socks. *Bev - when you read this - go ask Jeff for an explanation if you need one. :)

After lunch we strolled around Wengen some more and found a souvenir shop with almost affordable items in it in so bought a few things each then we were off to Kleine Scheidegg on another cogwheel railway.

Kleine Scheidegg is the departure point for the trip up to the Jungraujoch "Top of Europe", so called because it is the highest point accessible by cable car in all of Europe.  

Naturally, and perhaps perversely, we didn't go up there.  

By this point in the trip we had been up several mountains plus the top was covered in cloud so the very pricey ticket price seemed like it would have been wasted .

Instead we looked around the station for a while and then boarded another cogwheel train back down to Grindelwald Grund and our trusty hire car.

Seeing the day was still young and it stays light until 9.30pm, we decided to head down to Interlaken to have a look around.

Interlaken is quite pretty: the lake and river colour are beautiful and the town itself is also very attractive. But don't take my word for it ... ask any one of the million Asian tourists who were swarming there that day.  

Oh my goodness... it's a VERY popular location for tour groups and boy do they absolutely love the watch shops, not to mention the casino!

Bev found another folk show to go to, next to the Casino, so she & Jeff headed off for that while Jill and I walked around some more then had drinks and dessert followed by dinner. That's the way it should be surely? Eat dessert first and only if you have room after, then eat dinner. Ha.

After dinner Jill & I had a look around the shops which had thankfully cleared of the tourist locust plague and I finally found a watch that a) I liked, and b) was affordable enough to not make my credit card run away from the EFTPOS machine!

Meanwhile the dinner show was a bit of a bust apparently. The lady running it had zero charisma and from the sounds of it the only people from the audience who participated were Jeff & Bev, the only white people in the audience. Jeff had fun playing the Alpen-horn, while Bev enjoyed a dance on stage with the lead singer (they were the only two dancing btw).

Such a shame after enjoying the one in Lucerne so much. At least the food was good! The show was free ... proving that you really do get what you pay for! 

After this we headed home to our Heidi House for a well-deserved sleep after our big day exploring.