Missed cars and missed flights, but farmhouses, flowers, fondue and snow capped mountains. .
I’d never heard of Stechelberg. Or Lauterbrunnen or Interlaken. I don’t even now how Bekky heard about them, but that’s where we were headed after Lucerne. Mind you, I didn’t know the Capital of Switzerland was Bern, I thought it was Zurich, so there you go. Geography was never my strong point.
The original plan was to hire a car and drive the Furka Pass on the way there. We were flexible on that, depending on timing. We were having such a lovely time in Lucerne we were willing to sacrifice a drive around hairpin bends on the wrong side of the road to look at some building that the road loops around.
We packed up our stuff and stored it at the hotel and had a lovely few hours meandering around lucerne and doing some shopping. We bought groceries for our stay in the mountains and headed over to pick up the hire car, only to discover they closed at 3pm and it was 4 by the time we got there. Oh dear. Slight dilemma. We can’t make phone calls as we only have data. The Hire car mob obviously haven’t cottoned onto What’sApp so we can’t contact them. I send them an email and eventually received a reply to come back on Monday morning. That’s not very helpful. A quick google search reveals there are no other hire car places in Lucerne open. We gather up our shopping and head to a helpful information centre at the Train Station. An hour later we have booked a car through the same mob but pick up from Zurich airport. The opposite direction to where we’re headed but we’ve run out of options. The lady on the phone for the car hire mob was quoting me 600euro for a manual car. The original booking was for 500 euro for an auto and extra driver and other extras. Bekky is in the background doing research and the app for the same company says we can hire a car for 300euro? I ask the lady to price match and she says she can’t. (Same company, go figure). She also says she can’t transfer my booking, I have to rebook and then I can apply to have my old booking refunded. Arrrgh. So I have to download the app because the old booking will have to match the new booking. There’s a moment of panic when I think I have to confirm the booking via the email but that one email address I used won’t send from my phone, only my laptop, which is back at the hotel. Anyway, we finally get the car booked, plus 2 trains to get to Zurich airport. We catch a bus back to the hotel to get our bags, then another bus back to the train station with all our bags plus the groceries we had expected to load straight into the hire car as well as the flowers I bought at the market that morning, and then off we go a few hours out of our way to hire a car and drive on the wrong side of the road around hair pin bends at night time to get to the alps. Are we having fun yet?
I message my partner who is flying from Berlin to tell him we have a slight mishap but we’re sorting it out but there’s a chance we will be late picking them up from the train station in Interlaken. We were supposed to have arrived early afternoon and settled into our accomm and then gone out exploring before picking them up at 9pm.
After a while he replies, “Bigger mishap here. Missed our flight”
Oh, the joys of travel!
We survived driving on the wrong side of the road again and the spaghetti bends and turned up at 10pm to try and find our farmhouse. Not an easy task. You can’t park at the farm. You can drive around ridiculously narrow roads to get a bit closer to drop your bags off. But it’s still a goat track so we just took in overnight essentials. Then back down the ridiculous road to park in a remote car park. Then we had to walk back up a different goat track in the dark.
I ask Bekky if we should be concerned about bears or deer (it was seriously remote wilderness we were walking in) but she had spotted a massive slug on the track so was more concerned about death by slug attack.
I was huffing and puffing and grumbling under my breath as we negotiated the steep, uneven path, already planning on looking for more accessible accommodation the next day. And then we woke up in the morning and from our bedroom window we could see snow capped mountains. All was forgiven.
We picked our wayward comrades up in the evening and we all fell head over heels in love with Switzerlands amazing beauty.
I probably should split this post into two or three smaller ones and there’s lots more I could tell you about, but I’m tired. I’ve just arrived in London and if I hang onto the idea of getting things perfect then I’ll never get around to posting anything.
Switzerland is stunning. Overwhelmingly stunning. Breathtakingly beautiful. Words and photos are simply inadequate to describe it.
(If you click on the pictures you can see them bigger and scroll through them)
