In the morning, we went for a walk to Murren (which is spelt with an umlaut, but I can't make one on the iPad, and before people tell me how, I'm not really caught up on the issue). Murren is the next town up from Gimmelwald, and is about an hour hike up about a thousand feet in elevation gain.
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| From August 13 Gimmelwald |
The hike is quite nice, and paved the whole way. In fact, we saw some cars driving, so it seems that it's very possible to drive between them. Maybe. Murren is a pretty interesting place. It's much larger than Gimmelwald, but some of that is illusion. Murren has a population of 450 people (compared to Gimmelwald's 130), but Murren has 2000 hotel beds, which is about the most ridiculous ratio of tourists to residents I have ever seen. Murren is also where things like a grocery store are found.
We tried to buy food in Murren at the Co-op, but we failed to take into account that today is Sunday. In small places, everything closes on Sunday, and so the grocery store was closed. Luckily, we found a bakery, and grabbed a few things to eat. Thing is, eating at a restaurant in Murren is ludicrously expensive. A bowl of soup would have cost us roughly $12 CAD each. And that's not fancy soup.
At the very top of the mountain we are on (which is called Schilthorn) is a revolving restaurant, which we did not visit, because we did not feel like spending $100 each to get there, plus whatever ridiculous prices the restaurant itself would charge. This restaurant is so awesome, they used it in the James Bond film In Her Majesty's Secret Service, filmed back in the 1960's. Anyways, it would be cool to visit, but not several hundred dollars cool.
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| From August 14 Gimmelwald |
Because we were tired and cranky and it looked like it was going to rain, we decided to take the cable car back down to Gimmelwald, instead of walking back. This was not overly terrifying, but gave some pretty nice views. We saw a suspension walking bridge across a gaping chasm that we wanted to walk to, but it turns out you can't get to it without mountaineering equipment, which we do not have.
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| From August 14 Gimmelwald |
After lunch, Darcy and I lazed around (because we are exhausted) while Mom, Dad and Chris went on a hike up to a nearby waterfall, called Sprutz. It was about an hour up a very steep path, but the waterfall was pretty awesome. You could walk right behind the waterfall. Mom may have taken a few photos.
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| From August 14 Gimmelwald |
After they returned, Darcy and I cooked supper, and then we went off on a walk of our own. We cleverly decided to walk down instead of up. We didn't know exactly where we were going, but en route, we found a waterfall of our own. We couldn't go behind it, but it was pretty cool.
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| From August 14 Gimmelwald |
Eventually, we ended up at the bottom of the valley at a bridge over a river. It was pretty nice, and a worthwhile place to walk to, even if on the way back we had to walk up. Tomorrow we leave Gimmelwald, and it will be sad, but we did get to do some nice hiking though the Alps.
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| From August 14 Gimmelwald |
Anyways, here are the pictures from today, dominated mostly by pictures from mom, but with some from Chris and I as well. Today is also the day that Picasa informed me I had hit my quota for pictures (because Mom's camera has too many megapixels), so I had to buy more. Now I have infinite space (or 20 GB). So, here are the pictures, which are NOT free.
Daniel, since you have Google+ any photos that are sized 2048x2048 or smaller do not count against your storage quota. Looking at your photo information, it looks like most photos are about 2800px across the largest side, so it shouldn't be a big deal to shrink them down a bit. Picasa Desktop will do this for you, if you ask nicely.
ReplyDeleteI did not know any of these things. However, it will not do much much good to shrink them all down in Picasa Desktop, as all I have with my is my iPad, which does not have such an option. There may be an app I can find, but it is a bit late now.
ReplyDelete