Swiss Land

This past weekend Graham, Ben and I went to a little place called Interlaken, Switzerland. I realize I am not what you would consider a well traveled individual, but I have been to what I though were a lot of beautiful places. Interlaken is by far the most amazing place I have ever seen or could imagine. It is a little town in a valley that has two gorgeous lakes on each side of it. The air smells of “cookies and pine needles”-(Ben Balagia), the water is crayon blue and the place is surrounded by the snow capped Alps and rolling green hills.





On the way out of town Sunday morning, we missed our first train because we were at the wrong station, so the trip was delayed about 4 hours but we would eventually make it to Switzerland. Just a test, that we obviously failed, to get the travel mistakes out early before we try to conquer the rest of Europe later in the fall. Anyways, Switzerland is just covered in lakes and beautiful mountainsides which made the 7 hour train ride go by rather quickly. We got to Interlaken and found our hostel called Balmer’s, which I highly recommend if you are planning on going, and got settled. We had to sign up for our events that night to make sure we could go so we had to make a decision quickly. Didn’t really know what exactly we wanted to do besides skydiving but knew we had some more time to be extreme if we wanted to. Back in Paris I had talked to some people on my tours about Canyoning and they were insistent that I do it if I made it to Interlaken. It didn’t take much convincing, but I got Graham and Ben on board so we signed up for them both. That night we went to the Hooters in town, against Grahams will, to get dinner. Not culturally stimulating I know, but Ben and I had been craving onion rings and wings so we got our way. Our waitress was named Ulrike. Think about it. After that we went to a bar in town called Cavernes that had some live music playing. Midway through the set Ben decides he wants to do a little number on the piano so he asks the lead singer if he would be cool with it. Two songs later he is jamming the Beatles “twist and shout” and the bar is loving it. The members of the band were all locals and didn’t all know the song real well so it kinda was just ended up being a repeat of the chorus over and over again, still great though. We would take it in a little early so we could get up and be extreme all day. Canyoning all day on Monday and Skydiving Tuesday morning. I had no idea how intense things would get over the next 48 hours.