Days 15, 16 and 17

This is the last post about our vacation. We're back home now, trying to catch up on everything that went neglected for the past three weeks. We had a great trip, and would highly recommend Austria and Switzerland to anyone who has a desire to visit them. They're both beautiful countries full of fun and interesting things to do.

Day 15 was spent touring a museum in Brienz called the Ballenberg Open Air Museum. They've taken a bunch of traditional buildings from all over Switzerland, some dating back into the 1300s, and moved them into this big park outside the town. You can walk through all the old buildings, see demonstrations of all kinds of skills and crafts from the olden days, and check out farm animals from the area. It was pretty neat. They had a wide range of architectural styles from all over the country. We saw live demonstrations of tatting, meat smoking, shingle making, wood carving, charcoal making, and an actual saw mill powered by a water wheel in action. We walked through many old buildings, some quite large, and realized just how lucky we are to have the modern conveniences we have today.






After the museum, we went over to Interlaken to walk up and down the main street, then we hit the grocery store once again for dinner supplies. We spent the evening back at the apartment in Lauterbrunnen making hamburgers for dinner and doing laundry.

Day 16 was spent in the Lauterbrunnen area. We started with a trip up the valley to the Trummelbach Falls. This is a super cool waterfall that has carved its way into the rock and is almost entirely inside the mountain. There is an underground elevator that takes you up about halfway to the top, and then you wander through a series of tunnels, up and down inside the mountain, to catch glimpses of the waterfall. The sound is incredible, and the amount of water falling and twisting its way through the mountain is just amazing to see.




We went back to our apartment for a quick lunch, then took the cable car and train from Lauterbrunnen to Murren. We took a nice easy hike from Murren to Grutschalp and the cable car back down from there. We got back to Lauterbrunnen in the late afternoon, and we proceeded back to the apartment to drop off the car before dinner. We eventually wandered back into town because we had an appointment with a coworker of Michelle's who was scheduled to arrive in Lauterbrunnen that evening. We found him and his wife, passed on our advice on what they should see and do in the area the next day, took them back to the apartment so they could see what a Swiss apartment looked like, and then all drove back into town together. They had dinner at their hotel with their tour group, and we went to dinner at another hotel in town for grilled steak and lamb before calling it a night (they gave us bibs to wear at dinner, LOL).




Day 17 was spent doing mostly end of the trip sorts of things. We had to drive to Zurich, check into our hotel at the airport, then take our new car over to the shipping company so it could be sent back to the US. It was a bit sad to turn it in, knowing it would be a while before we got to see it again, but we managed. After that, we went back to the hotel, where Michelle got in a quick workout and Jeff got in some surfing before we got dressed to go to dinner at Petermann's Kunststuben, our one very fancy meal for the trip. We took the train from the airport to dinner, and settled in for a four hour dining extravaganza. Here are some pictures from dinner:






After dinner, it was back to the airport for the night. We flew back to St. Louis the next morning. We're so glad we had the opportunity to take this trip, and we hope there will be many more to come in the future!