Adventures in the Alps

I went to Interlaken with three girls I had never travelled with before: Courtney, Ashley, and Roxanne. We took a six hour train ride and arrived in Interlaken around 10. We struggled a little trying to find our hostel. It was funny because we passed these two men one the street who over heard us talking about how we're kinda lost and they said "ask us, we speak English". It turns out they were from the east coast and they seemed pretty frustrated with some frat guys that were staying at the same hostel as them so they were leaving. Once we checked in at the over crowded smokey bar in our hostel we ventured to find something to eat. Everything was closed by then, so we settled for McDonalds. Normally I wouldn't buy anything, but I was craving something sweet so I got a McFlurry that had some swizz chocolate candy in it called Cailler. It was by far the best McFlurry I've had so I give the credit to the swiss chocolate.
Our hostel was pretty nice. We had our own room and bathroom. It was small, but cozy and the walls in the halls were bright orange with paintings of sparkley people with giant spiral stair cases. It reminded me and one of the girls of hogwarts in Harry Potter.

Anyway...The next morning we woke up, ate our free hostel breakfast, and asked the people at the desk/bar about tobagganning. The guys said the conditions didn't look promising (it was snowing pretty hard up the mountains), but that we could take a train up to the ski town of Grindelwald and they would know better if we could still go. Grindelwald turned out to be the cutest ski town full of tourists in their gear. It definitely was snowing hard, but the people at the rental shop said we could still go. We got all geared up, bought a day pass at the train station, and hopped on the train to go up the mountain. On the way to the train station some man threw a snow ball at me...i just laughed and thought "welcome to Grindelwald" haha. People were so laid back it was awesome.

Instead of ski lifts in this area of the mountain they cart people up the mountains with trains. We never fingured out how this works because the tracks were covered with snow and the trains were either traveling up or down a really steep part. So the trains were packed with people in their gear with the tobaggans or skis stashed by the enterences of the train. We got off at a stop called Alpiglen and follow people in front of us. We had to walk for about 5 minutes to get to the beginnging ot the path that was marked with poles. Basically you sit on the sled and steer and stop with your feet. There was no track, just a general path to follow. It was hard to control the sled at first, but we got used to it. During the really steep areas the snow was kicking back into our faces (and we didn't rent goggles) from our feet trying to break. I can't really even decribe how fun tobagganing was, and ufortunately none of my pictures show just how steep the paths were either. No sledding will ever compare to this...its like sledding as an extreme sport. At some points our path merged with the skiiers which made it harder because the snow would be flatter and make us go faster. The paths went through the pine trees and past log cabins. At some points we were in the middle of no where just sledding along in the Swiss Alps...a pretty cool feeling! It took about 1/2 hour to ride the train up, walk to the path, and sled down until a restaurant area. We did this three times before breaking for lunch. After lunch we ventured to try to continue downt the mountain on a path from that restaurant area to an area called the Grund (I think it means valley). This path was even more scenic and long...it probably took us 15 minutes to get down the whole thing, but that includes the time we spent walking when our sleds wouldn't move anymore.

On what we decided would be our last run it was way more crowded then when we started, and little speed bumps were growing in size and number making controlling the sled much harder. I was stuck behind some dad and his kid who were moving slow, but once I got around them I realized the people that were stopped ahead were my friends. Two of them had collided and one of the tobaggans had hit Ashley in the face. Her nose was bleeding and she was trying to ice it with snow. I stopped and helped Courtney get her sled that had fallen down a huge snow drift while Roxanne made sure Ashley was okay. She didn't want to sled anymore, obviously, so we slowly made our way down to the restaurant. On the way I was sledding realy slow, so I made a video on my camera that I'm going to try to put on here...nothing exciting but you can see the area we were in sort of. At the resting point we waited for the next train to Grindelwald, and from there we caught a train back to Interlaken.
We were starving at this point and had been planning on getting fondu, so we set out to find a place. We ended up at a towny place that had way over priced but still delicious cheese fondu. It only came with bread, though, so we think the apple thing must be an American tradition (other places we checked out seemed to only serve bread with it too). After dinner we crashed at the hostel for the night.
The next morning we planned on exploring Interlaken, but nothing was open! I expected some stores to be closed like everywhere else in Europe, but it was such a touristy town that I was surprised by this. Only one store was open so we kinda wandered around until our train came. Unfortunately it was still pretty foggy and snowy so we couldn't see the mountains very well. Despite being a short weekend with the accident too, it was definitely my favorite trip thus far. I would love to go back and tobaggan again (or ski if I could). Staying in Grindlewald would be awesome too.

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