Farewell to Beautiful Switzerland….for now…..

On Tuesday morning and we packed up and said goodbye to the campsite with the best views so far; mind you, it was also the most expensive campsite so far, but absolutely worth every cent.  The sun was shining again on the mountain tops; I know I really will miss this place and I cried as we left.

First stop on today’s trip was just around the corner at Gletscher Schlucht (glacier gorge).  Still wearing shorts, we put on two layers of fleecy jumpers and paid to enter the chilly gorge.

Within 20 metres, the roar of the Lütschine River is incredibly loud as all the melt water from the surrounding mountains and Unter Grindelwald Gletscher squeezes down through the very narrow gorge.  The pathway leads you uphill, sometimes passing through tunnels and sometimes along metal walkways clinging to the rock face.

 

At times, the top of the cliff above seems to touch the opposite side, which makes you feel like you are in an enormous cavern.  The path continues for about a kilometre up the gorge and then you turn around and come back down.  We warmed up with hot chocolate in the café and when we got back to Eileen my ears were still ringing with the thundering sound of the river.

 

We drove back down to Wilderswil and turned up the valley through Lauterbrunnen to the end of the road at Stechelberg.

 

This valley is so different to Grindelwald, being a massive U shape valley with lots of long waterfalls dropping down the western side.

 

We parked back down near Lauterbrunnen and enjoyed a scenic picnic before driving back down to Interlaken and along the Thuner Lake through Spiez to Thun.  We need to be in Obernai tomorrow afternoon, so we decided to get some mileage under our belts and get up close to Basel for the night.  We headed north through Bern, Solothur, Balsthal, Liestal and hit Basel in the evening rush hour.   It took us nearly five hours of driving from Lauterbrunnen to Huningue on the French / German / Swiss border (with a half hour stop, for a much needed cup of tea for the driver).

As we headed north we noticed that the building style was changing again.  There were no more picture book wooden chalets, they were now a more solid German style with enormous roofs.  The land became flatter and more cultivated with corn and wheat, we even saw our very first fields of sunflowers in full bloom; always a beautiful sight to see.  Oh and we’ve seen more spectacular roundabouts, there was one in Thun that had the Titanic sinking in to the centre of a flowerbed……had to get a picture of that one.

When we pulled in to Camping Au Petit Port on the banks of the Rhine in Huningue a thunderstorm exploded and we settled in for the evening in Eileen, now back in France.