Interlaken, Switzerland! The death of a shoe!

Utrecht, the Netherlands

Monday

The first city I planned on visiting was Interlaken, a small swiss town nestled amongst the middle of the Alps right in the center of Switzerland, with a lot of easy access to hiking. My initial route there was pretty direct, but just as I had all of my things packed and was about to depart on my trip, I realized that I didn't have my passport. After tearing my room apart for a few minutes, I finally found it, and was able to head out, but this little delay was enough for me to miss my first train in my itinerary. As a result, I had to take a different, slightly longer route, with transfers in Utrecht (a dutch city south of Amsterdam) and Frankfurt.

Another transfer was Frankfurt, but I was only there long enough to walk around the main street for a couple of blocks and buy a frankfurter (get it? because thats where I was!). The train ride down into Switzerland was beautiful, but sadly, as I showed up to the hostel, the skies opened and water poured out, so I was stuck in the hostel for the night. I cooked pasta from ingredients left there by previous travelers and met some of the hostels tenants. The majority of people in the hostel were American, and a large number of them were also using the Eurail pass to travel around for the summer. Since I had never heard of the Eurail pass before this trip, I was surprised that it was so widely used.

The hostel in Interlaken.

In Lauterbrunnen

Tuesday

Following a recommendation from another hostel-goer, I decided to visit Lauterbrunnen, an area about 10 minutes away from Interlaken. Three other people from the hostel and I decided to walked through a valley and then up one of the mountains. The hiking was great, although a bit cloudy near the top. Since this trip was at the beginning of June, I managed to avoid many of the crowds that would be traveling Europe later in the summer, and so saw next to no one else for much of the hike.










Once we reached a village near the top, a couple of Swiss guys gave us a ride in the back of their maintenance truck for 20 minutes or so. We hiked on for a little while longer and then split up, the three others hiking back to the hostel, and me continuing onwards for a few more hours.

I should mention that when I was initially leaving for Amsterdam back in the middle of January, I hadn't considered the possibility that I would be doing a lot of hiking, and as a result, instead of having boots for all of this hiking, all I had were some old tennis shoes that were falling apart. "Falling apart" isn't an exaggeration - halfway through my hike, the sole entirely separated from the shoe, and as I walked on by myself, half of the stitching on what was left of the bottom of the shoe broke.
I spent most of the afternoon/evening hiking, and then spent another night in the hostel.

Entirely unrelated song post:

There are two main reasons why you should listen to this song without knowing anything about it:

1. Its a remix of a song originally by Hans Zimmer, and therefore is inherently good.
2. It is by a band called We Plants are Happy Plants. How could a band with a name like that not make good music?

Hans Zimmer - Time (We Plants Are Happy Plants Remix) by WPAHP