Once upon a time I was randomly checking prices to Basel, Switzerland (because that's where Ryanair airline flies) and saw a killer deal on one three day weekend in June, right after Katya was finishing school. I simply could not pass up the deal-$160 for all five of us to fly to Switzerland and back! Although I already had another vacation reserved in Northumberland (Northern England) for those three nights, I quickly changed that reservation for a later date and started working on our Switzerland itinerary. First of all, I had to narrow down the area that we wanted to see since we only basically had two full days. So I remembered one lady on Facebook traveling group mentioning her kids had the best time in Jungfrau Eurocamp one week. I researched quickly that area and decided that it was exactly what we wanted--not a big city vacation but a hiking-meadows-mountains kind of trip. The plan was to fly into Basel and drive less than 2 hours to Interlaken area.
Switzerland is infamous for being ultra-expensive. As you can imagine, with a family of five, although we paid so little for our plane tickets, food and lodging would still add up and we were traveling on a tight budget, as always. I searched high and low for an affordable place to stay in the area where we were going, but nothing was showing up. Finally, I looked into Eurocamp, which is sort of like camping but in a stationary mobile home and found one in a great location near Interlaken. It was $50 cheaper to book it through the German Eurocamp website rather than through the English one, so that's what I did! Everything was in German and I had to think back to all the German I ever learnt at school plus utilize Google Translator in order for me to make sure I actually booked a real accommodation, but it worked.
Fast forward to June 12th...Our flight was at noon, and we thought how wonderful it was we didn't have to leave our house at 6 am to catch an early flight...but then it all backfired a bit. Our flight got delayed for an hour and half which meant we were getting into Basel later than we hoped for and had barely enough time to pick up our rental car and drive to Interlaken to find our "house" before 8 pm. The original plan was to stop by at Bern for dinner and walk around the historical town for a while.
By the way, before we venture out too far, I have to tell you about Basel airport. It's an interesting place as it's a spot where three countries--France, Switzerland and Germany-meet, thus you have signs like this all over the luggage claim area to guide you to the country you need to go to. It's kind of cool!
All right, so this is what our house looked like. It had everything we needed but as a tiny version. I am not sure I could stay there for longer than a week, but it was perfect for three nights.
That evening we drove to Interlaken (5 minutes) for some dinner. We were starving and it was late, so all the food tasted simply delicious! I had Rosti--yummm!!! It's thinly shredded potatoes panfried until golden with added cheese, ham and whatever else you want. It was a great start to our vacation although that dinner alone (with Mark eating off our plates) was still over $100.
Next morning we quickly got up, packed up our hiking gear, snacks, water, and a bunch of other daypack necessities and drove 30 minutes pass Lauterbrunnen to Stechelberg. It's a tiny village where you can find a cable car to Gimmewald and from Gimmewald to Murren and from Murren to Birg and from Birg to the Shilthorn a 2970 meter summit of the Bernese Alps.
At each of those stations we had to get out of the cable car and transfer to the next one which was conveniently ready to go up once everyone was loaded.
Cable cars departed every 20-30 minutes. The one from Murren to the top was a long one--20 minute ride hanging in the air.
As we were going higher and higher, the scenery was changing dramatically. It was amazing!
Middle of June.
On the very top, we enjoyed the view from the platform.
The temperature on top was around 3C, but it wasn't very windy and felt great.
The restaurant on the Schilthorn is called Piz Gloria, the place where 1969 James Bond movie was filmed, thus the cut out figure of George Lazenby.
Nah..this looks better.
And here are my favorite people in no particular order and Alex missing-haha.
Still a toothless grin...and nothing in sight.
My Alpine beauty.
And we found snow! Good thing we brought snow gloves!
Katya even built a snowman!
Just look at this heavenly view!
Our three lucky minions.
I think we spent about an hour on top and headed back down to Murren. Part of the adventure was looking down at the tiny houses and be amazed how high we were "floating".
Murren was our pit stop before the next part of the day. We had time to fill up our water bottles and wash kids' faces-haha.
Eating our packed lunch with the best view in town.
Love my active hiking family:)
I'll take a pause here. Lots more pictures to come...and I am running out of time, forgetting the details so fast!
Bye-bye for now!
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