Today we checked out of the Happy Inn Lodge after a quick FaceTime with my Mom & Dad, and headed to the Inkterlaken West train station. The morning is grey and cool. We boarded our double-decker train without incident, filled in the date on our rail pass, and settled in for the ride to Bern. The views were not quite as spectacular as yesterday's train ride, but still pleasant.

Arriving in Bern, we came out of a funny part of the train station (not in the main building at all) and were momentarily disoriented . Bryan got out the iPhone with our walking tour map on it, and soon had gotten his bearings. I am so glad that his sense of direction is better than mine! :)

I must be honest, we may have set rather optimistic goals for our short lay over in Bern. We wanted to have a snack, buy food for lunch, and see some of the town. We had only limited time (1 1/2hrs) and cash (14 CHF) to accomplish these things. But for the most part, we were successful.

We first followed the walking tour suggested in our guidebook past a church, fountains, market, the Parliament building and down to the river. (Still the Aare river that we had walked along yesterday in Interlaken.) We walked along fairly quickly, and then looped back to the train station.

We found a Migro grocery store and shopped for lunch. I carried the iPhone around using the calculator app so we knew how much we were spending. We bought bread, apples, deli meat (turkey?) and a chilled 7Up . We skipped on the chips and juice to save a little for something at the bakery. Now lunch was well in hand.

Then came the tricky part. We wanted to get a pastry like we had the past two mornings. We had saved 4.9 CHF (what we had spent for breakfast previously). But we were only able to find one item (out of three bakeries we visited) that I could eat safely. (Meanwhile, as I'm asking if they speak English and what has milk in it, our departure time was drawing nearer.) The one thing we did find looked kind of like a chocolate meringue, but cost more than we had spent before, leaving Bryan no money for a croissant. :( So we finally decided to skip it. We got Bryan a cinnamon roll. Then I went into a store and got Bryan a cold Sprite and myself an apple juice box. We left Bern with 10 cents. I think that is pretty good. It is like Price is Right, you know. You want to go as close to the cash you have in hand as possible without going over. ;)

And that was Bern . Or at least, that is how we saw it today. We are now on a train headed for Zurich. The train is running 4 minutes late, and we will not have very much time to make our connection. Hopefully we will make it, otherwise we will be hanging out in Zurich for about 2 hours waiting for the next train bound to Innsbruck.

We had an app on our iPhone that we could use to check the train schedules anywhere in Europe. It was a huge timesaver and we always knew when we needed to be at the station to make our connection. In this case we had figured out that if we got up a little earlier we would have the chance to walk around Bern a little bit. We really didn't give ourselves enough time and the stop ended up being more stressful than either of us would have preferred. Still, we learned that lesson and made much better use of our side trips as the trip went on.