The next few days, we decided to take things a little slower. It wasn’t entirely straight forward to extract my parents from their beds on Sunday morning, and it must have been 11am before we left the apartment. We headed in the direction of the Pfingsteggbahn, a small cable car which we could actually see from our kitchen window. This departed from a station just down the road, and ascended a short distance to a little ledge on the opposite side of the valley. It was rather an old-fashioned sort of cable car (Swiss old-fashioned = small) and the way we were all crammed in like sardines meant there wasn’t really much of a view. (more…)

On Friday evening I gave my parents a stern talking to, and we all agreed that we were going to make a special effort to get out early on Saturday morning. We were planning to make the most exciting excursion in the entire Bernese Oberland; a journey on the Jungfraujoch railway to 3454m. If the mention of that altitude doesn’t impress you, imagine three Snowdons on top of each other, and you’re not quite there yet (more…)

Our aim for Friday was to get to Muerren, a tiny car-free village which perches on a rocky outcrop on the far side of the Lauterbrunnen valley. It is car-free not due to any particular environmental sentiments, but simply because it is scarcely reachable by road. The sides of the valley are literally so sheer that the only real public access is by cable car! Since Grindelwald lies in the neighbouring valley, the most straight forward way of reaching Muerren would simply have been to take a train to Zweiluetschinnen, catch another train to Lauterbrunnen, and then ride up in the afore-mentioned cable car. Because, however, we were in possession of super-duper train passes, we decided to do something a little different (more…)

We had a slow start to Thursday due to my mother complaining of various ailments, but eventually we all succeeded in boarding a train in the direction of Wilderswil. Wilderswil is the small town which lies on the railway line between Interlaken and Zweiluetschinnen, and as far as I was aware it had nothing to recommend it. In fact, all I have ever thought about it is that it would be a dreadful destination for a skiing holiday, because all the trains carrying people to the slopes fill up at Interlaken Ost, with the result that there is hardly any space on them at all for those holiday-makers who are saving money by staying in the lesser-known Wilderswil. In summer, however, Wilderswil is the starting station for the ancient funicular railway which, in a journey of around 50 minutes, ascends 1300m until it reaches the Schynige Platte at 1967m. (more…)

Setting the alarm for half seven always seems like such a good idea the night before. My sister hates my alarm clock with a vengeance and was thus none too pleased when the cockerel began to crow at the afore-mentioned hour on Wednesday morning. We’d bought bread rolls from the Coop for breakfast the night before, but upon closer inspection the packaging revealed a recommendation to bake them for an additional ten minutes in the oven. As far as I was concerned, they already looked perfectly well cooked and I would quite happily have eaten them as they came and had done with it, but my family don’t like to live dangerously and so cooked they had to be. There was so much commotion involved in locating a baking tray, pronouncing it dirty, disinfecting it and the like, that somehow breakfast seemed to take in excess of one hour (more…)

I was about to start what will probably turn out to be a very long series of posts about my holiday by announcing that I am now home. This would technically be inaccurate, as to be precise I am currently in the Premier Inn at Euston I successfully returned from Switzerland on Saturday evening, but early this morning I was off again, this time to London where I am working on the audit of one of our solicitor clients. It would be difficult to imagine more of a contrast to where I have been for the last two weeks than London; all the noise, the bustle of the Tube, is a far cry from the small mountain village of Grindelwald in the Bernese Oberland where my parents had rented a chalet for a fortnight. It was a thoroughly enjoyable holiday, admittedly not without it’s frustrations, but nevertheless truly lovely I was totally relaxed when I returned to the UK, but that has been marred slightly this afternoon by the fact that a member of client staff used an F word at me. Back to reality :cry:

This time I learnt from my mistake in Hungary and managed to force myself to write a paper diary as I went along. I spent most of the holiday feeling utterly exhausted, and so some days I may have written less than others, but I certainly have enough to go on for my blog without the painful wracking of brains which I had to subject myself to after the IJK (more…)