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On Monday I got to see Katie for the first time in nearly five months, and I got to reunite with her in the absolutely beautiful country of Switzerland. After graduating at the beginning of May, Katie has been traveling Europe for the past couple of weeks with her friends Emily and Annie. The original plan was for me to travel with them for a week or so and then fly with them back to Alicante for a couple of days on the beach before we all flew out of Madrid on June 5th. However, I changed my flight home about a month ago from the 5th to the 1st to be able to spend more than just a day at home and consequently messed up their travel plans quite a bit. So, in the end I decided to travel Switzerland with them for a couple of days before heading back to Alicante for my last weekend, and they decided to head for Barcelona for the beach next week in place of Alicante.
I met up with their group in Interlaken, Switzerland on Monday after flying into Basel and then taking a two hour train southeast of there. It
was a lot of traveling just to arrive, but I really enjoyed it once I was in Switzerland. The countryside is very picturesque and green, especially when the Alps come into view. When I finally reached Interlaken I found the hostel we were staying at, a quaint chalet complex established in 1800 something, and found Katie and the other girls. It was so good to see her again! I don’t normally see her that often with us going to school eight hours apart and most certainly won’t next year with her being at Duke, but being an entire ocean apart makes it seem harder. We spent Monday evening catching up and just relaxing at the hostel. We got a game of “Oh Nuts” in, of course, and then got talking to a group of Australians staying there who were a lot of fun.
Tuesday was our big adventure day, Interlaken being an amazing area where outdoor activities are overly abundant. All over town there are advertisements for bungee jumping, hang gliding, glacier climbing, sky diving, and just about any other life-risking activity you could ever dream of. Out of those, we chose to do canyoning - or actually Katie
chose for us to do canyoning. I had no idea what it was until she showed me a YouTube video of what we’d be doing - at which point I peed my pants… Not really, but the concept of jumping, sliding, and repelling my way down a raging river didn’t exactly leave me feeling calm. It turned out to be amazing though, and I’m so glad we did it.
The group we did canyoning with was called Outdoor Interlaken, and at 9:30 Tuesday morning they picked us up from our hostel to take us to their camp to get ready for the day. We each put on a long-legged neoprene suit, neoprene jacket, life vest, harness, and helmet before being ready to go. Then we drove five minutes from there into the mountains close by before stopping and walking about ten minutes up a trail to the point where we would start. As our two instructors were telling us how to maneuver in the water and an anything but passive glacier water river raged through a narrow canyon beside us, I was not feeling too sure about the decision we’d made. Never-the-less, when we got in the water and
started downstream I started to feel more comfortable. The hardest part of the entire thing for me was navigating across the current from one side to the other, feeling my way through the rocks under the water and trying not to let the current sweep me off my feet, not jumping over waterfalls or repelling down rock walls. That really surprised me, but overall I loved the entire experience - despite my enormous fear of water. We ended up spending about an hour or hour and a half in the water and jumped over three small waterfalls, repelled down one rock wall, slid through several small rapid series, and swung around one rock corner Tarzan style. The jumps were cool but extremely scary to me. On the first, we had to jump in and land on our backs and the other two we went in Superman style but turned on our side. The jumps themselves were not scary so much as the whole submerging yourself in freezing cold water and having to stop yourself after to avoid drifting downstream idea, but by the third time it was much easier. The slides were fun too, especially the long last one, but
I liked the swing around the rock best. There was a larger waterfall below us that wasn’t jumpable, so there were ropes set up on the canyon wall next to it that had to be used to get to the other side. We had a clip hooked to our harnesses and were backed down the rock on the start side until we were just above the waterfall. Then we pushed off the wall and swung pendulum style around to the other side. Very cool. The time canyoning went by way too fast, we wished we’d signed up for the eight hour trip, but I can honestly say it was the most exciting thing I’ve ever done. It was incredible!
After getting back to the hostel, we spent the rest of the afternoon there relaxing and that night got together with the Australian group again. We exchanged a handful of drinking games and spent the night singing “Bunny Bunny, Bunny Bunny!” and getting hip-checked by our dancing Aussie friends. Muy interesante. The next day, we spent our time in the neighboring town of Lotterbraunen. We took a short train ride there and then walked about forty-five minutes outside of town
to a glacial waterfall park called Tremmelbach. There was a handful of waterfalls running down the mountainsides on the way there, but the park itself was a series of ten waterfalls accessible by stairs and tunnels running up and through the glacier. It was extremely cold and scary to see the intense power of all that water, but it was a good afternoon. After leaving we spent some time messing around in the meadow outside the park, in the valley between the Alps, and took about a million pictures. I felt like I was in The Sound of Music - it was beautiful.
On Wednesday night, I said goodbye to the Katie, Emily, and Annie before they left to catch their night train to Rome. I was sad to see them go but so glad I got to spend time with them in such a wonderful setting. My flight left from Basel on Thursday afternoon, so I spent Thursday morning reading and relaxing at the lake a few miles outside of Interlaken before catching my train back north and then my flight back to Alicante. Switzerland was the last trip of my semester in Europe and knowing that made
me a little sad. I also know that I travelled quite a bit more than I thought I would though and am grateful to have been able to see so much and to have spent time with family here. Last year I would have never dreamed that I’d be in Rome with my parents or Switzerland with my sister this semester, and I feel so blessed to have been able to do that. My time in Spain is almost done now, only two days left, and I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on all that I’ve done here. I’m a huge mess of emotions lately, knowing that I leave so soon and not quite knowing how to feel about it, but I don’t think it will truly hit me until tomorrow night that I’m really leaving this wonderful place. We’ll see how I feel then.
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