When we first moved to Luxembourg, the top place Nate wanted to travel to was Switzerland. Although it wasn’t the first place we visited, we made it our big trip for the summer so we wouldn’t put it off anymore. We LOVED Switzerland, and Nate was not at all disappointed. We drove out on Monday morning for the 5.5-hour drive to Interlaken. It seemed that as soon as we drove into Switzerland, we started seeing beautiful scenery everywhere. We made it to Interlaken, where we were staying for the week. It’s a tourist / resort city between two large lakes and at the base of a large mountain range.
We checked into our “campsite”, which was essentially a mobile home in a campground. It started raining almost as soon as we got there, so we decided to make our tin foil dinners (which took FOREVER to cook…) and took turns taking the kids on walks down to the lake (a 5-minute walk), where they loved throwing rocks in the water and Bennett practiced skipping rocks. After dinner, we needed to get out of the tiny mobile home, so we drove up the nearby canyon and drove through Lauderbrunnen and Grindelwald, two little towns in different valleys. It got dark quickly, but we loved what we did get to see.
a tunnel we drove through on our way to Interlaken – the roads were crazy!, the kids at the lake, and Staubbach Falls in Lauderbrunnen.
On Tuesday, the kids woke up early so Nate took them down to the lake while I got things ready for the day. Bennett was super excited that Nate taught him how to skip rocks, and he picked it up quickly. The other two just threw more rocks in the water.
We drove back to the Lauderbrunnen Valley, which is nicknamed the “Valley of the 72 Waterfalls”. One of the waterfalls we had heard great things about was Trummelbach Falls, which is a series of 10 waterfalls inside a rock mountain. The water going through the falls comes from two glaciers, and it was so impressive! They don’t let kids under 4 in, so Nate took Bennett and Ryan, and I stayed outside with Eliza. While they were in there, I considered not going since I would have to pay and they would all have to wait, but Nate came out and said it was worth every penny. Bennett stayed in there so he could show me around, and it was amazing! Ryan didn’t like it because it was so loud – he held his hands over his ears the whole time. The waterfalls were loud, fast, and wound through the rock in the mountain.
After Trummelbach falls, we found a beautiful spot along the river to eat our picnic lunch and let the kids throw rocks in the water again. We went back to Lauderbrunnen and did a short hike up behind Staubbach Falls and walked through the small town. We headed back to our mobile home for naps (for Ryan and Eliza – Nate and Bennett took a drive up in the mountains), then we rode a boat into Interlaken to attempt to find dinner we could afford. Unfortunately, we ended up at McDonald’s because we couldn’t find a not-too-expensive restaurant that we thought the kids might like. And even more unfortunate, the McDonald’s was the most expensive one we had ever been to. Good thing there was a (very minimal) kitchen in our mobile home.
