After a restful sleep after being forced to watch Pretty Women in French we got our day started very early with breakfast and a beautiful sunrise up in the Alps. I had a great conversation with a guy from Georgia and his wife on the inability of Europe to pay for their early retirement and large benefit programs. The couple in their mid fifties spurred a thought in me that I hope I can keep and fulfill. They came to Murren to ski in the winter twenty-five years ago and always pledged to come back at some point during the summer and this was their journey back. I think it’s a great idea and will come back in twenty-five years to go skiing!
Long story short, we ended up getting back into Interlaken and were too late to really do many of the extreme sports that we wanted to do. I really wanted to go zorbing, but found out that it is only done in the early morning. If you’re not familiar with zorbing; it’s the activity in which you are placed in a plastic ball and roll down the mountain. I really want to try to do that sometime though! Instead we did an almost free option which was to go back to Lautterbrunnen and do some hiking on the bike path along the river. We saw a smaller, but still cool waterfall nearby and hiked all the way up to it. We weren’t able to get entirely behind it, but were only about ten feet from doing so! It provided a great view of the valley. In Lautterbrunnen we accidentally walked through a cemetery. Cemeteries there look much different. The rows are very close and tight. We realized that they must not do the graveside burial at the burial plot, but rather outside or inside a building on the grounds. Otherwise it would be very difficult for people to stand.
The girls went shopping and I decided to just spend the final ninety minutes sitting on a park bench people watching and watching the paragliders land in the grass center of town. A few rough landings, but it appeared everyone was enjoying their glide down. We caught our train back and I sat across from a lady that started to speak to me in German. I soon told her I spoke English and she said a few things and laughed. Of course she brought up Obama and the oil spill. I showed her on a map of where I lived and how flat it was and she got plenty of amusement from that. Occasionally she would make comments to me and I wouldn’t understand, but she was apparently entertaining herself as she would always laugh.
Of course I got another sandwich in Bern and we met the rest of the group back at the hostel in Geneva again and checked in. We went out for dinner and drinks for Sara Shadowen’s 20th birthday and got a 10 liter beer tower for the whole group. It was much more impressive than the beer towers at Skipper’s in Oxford!
