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Europe travelogue part 1: Alpine heights
Finally! Pictures from our Europe trip in July.
There is a weekly transpolar flight from Fairbanks to Frankfurt, Germany, using a small European airline called Condor Air. It only takes 8 hours, compared to 14+ hours to fly the more conventional route by way of the Lower 48.
So we began and ended in Frankfurt. Orion's conference was in Bologna, Italy, but it was only two days so we had the rest of the 2 weeks to ourselves.
On the first day, we drove from Frankfurt to a small town in the Swiss Alps called Engelberg, where we spent a couple of days.
The highlight was, naturally, the hiking.
The very definition of "pastoral".
We're climbing the hill next to this one. We could see little bitty fenceposts on top of that crag and we thought, naw, they couldn't possibly graze cattle up there, could they...?
... but they do; now we're standing on top.
One interesting thing about the Alps is how the mountains form a series of stair-steps. We climbed what seemed an impossibly steep 1000-foot hill and on top was this pleasant lake with cow pastures, a ski resort and a beautiful, round stone church overlooking the lake.
The sound of cowbells was ever-present, nearly everywhere we went -- to me the sound of a lot of distant cowbells at once sounded a little like running water and a little like xylophones.
We thought about climbing back down, then broke down and took the tram, which was an experience unto itself. It was actually quite relaxing and slow, but when the tram car would go over each of these towers, there would be a moment when it would give a little hitch and you'd be poised over the valley with a horrifying drop to the pastures far below. Definitely worth doing. The tram cars were quite small and we had one to ourselves.
We didn't realize it at the time, but one of the things we'd be questioned about when we went back into the US was whether we'd been exposed to cattle (worries about mad cow disease, and all of that). Hiking around in cow pastures probably qualifies...