Swiss Seafood...and an amazing bike ride

About once a month, the students and faculty at Swiss Semester have an opportunity to travel and experience an activity or see some sights that are truly Swiss.  This past weekend there were four trips offered to the students.  The first was a gorging trip where students don wetsuits and and rappel down into a cave/waterfall fed by local glaciers with cold water.  The walls of the cave/waterfall are worn down to a marble smooth surface so that sliding down in the water becomes an adventure.  For the second trip available to students, they could select to re-ascend the Breithorn but from a much more difficult approach.  In this activity, student once again wear crampons and a helmet and are tethered to a professional guide who leads the students up the mountain.  The third trip available to students was a very relaxing bike ride through a vineyard in the Lausaune region of Switzerland...as I understand it...a region know for their white wines.  And then there was my trip...a two day bike ride in the Bernese Oberland that included incredible views of the three famous mountains of the region...the Eiger, the Jungfrau and the Monch.  It also included the opportunities to ride through some beautiful villages of farms and chalets.  And it included some serious riding...both up and down.  But I got to spend the weekend with DJ...nothing better than an amazing ride with my handsome son!

Our trip covered about 50 miles of riding over the course of two days.  I know...I brought my Garmin bike computer along so that I could check.  But we also had some 'extra' miles that included train and gondola rides.  And you can see below, the Swiss rail service is very accommodating to cyclists.  They brought down a special open-air cargo car to hold all of our bikes.  Notice the engineer on the right in the orange...I assumed he was Swiss until he started yelling at the ticket taker and us in very clear Italian..."Venga, Venga, Venga".

The view from that first train ride to hamlet of Wengen was almost overwhelming.  We currently live in a beautiful part of the world in Zermatt.  But there was something very....well...Swiss about what we were seeing.  I expected to see film crews working on the sequel to The Sound of Music.  Rolling green farm land combined with the awesome and imposing presence of the mountains made this a special place.  Check out Wengen for yourself.  http://www.wengen.com/

This is just part of the crew that join us of the weekend trip.  Great kids.  A couple, including DJ, had done some 'real' mountain biking before.  The rest were in for a quite a challenge.  Truthfully, the ride challenged all of us.  The ups were real... "get out of your saddle, my legs are burning, am I hallucinating?"...hills.  This wasn't a Sunday stroll through Monument Valley Park.  But every uphill had a downhill.

Simply put, DJ is happy in the program.  He loves the friends he has met and appreciates the academic challenge he is faced with everyday.  Aside from needing a haircut...I'd say he looks alright!

I feel obligated to share some wisdom and insight...to those of you who may travel to this part of the world or simply share with those of you that are brighter than I (all of you) the potential problem that exists when ordering seafood from an Italian restaurant in SWITZERLAND!  In Wengen, where we spent the first night, we went out to dinner as a group.  The idea being...and has always been with world-class athletes...that a good helping of pasta the night before a rigorous activity will give you endless amounts of energy the body can use during the activity.  I am beginning to understand some German words by sight and sound.  This menu was a combination of Italian and German.  As I scrolled through the menu, I saw very little that I understood.  In a perfect world, I would have ordered my 'sausage, pepperoni, pineapple, jalapeno' pizza.  I didn't see the word sausage on the menu and have yet to see any reference to peppers since we left Colorado.  So, thrusting my CC education aside, I ordered spaghetti with mussels.  I ordered the mussels because the word was spelled the same in Italian, German and English.  It tasted great....for about 9 hours.  That's when all hell broke lose in my intestinal tract and I quickly realize that the Swiss are good at this meat and potato thing for a reason.

Can you see me in the photo below...ducking into the trees to deal with the mussels?  A Where's Waldo, blog style.  Just kidding...I'm the one taking the picture.  In all seriousness...Don't drink and drive and don't eat seafood in Switzerland.  

This again, is the cast of characters that went on the ride.  There I am...second from the left...longing to be running to the bathroom.  The Eiger, the Jungfrau and Monch are behind us.  The kids felt great about their accomplishment...getting to this vantage point.  And they should feel great.  It was a two hour climb straight from the hotel to this point.  Their smiles are well-deserved.

DJ has met some great knew friends during this experience.  None, however, will have the same impact on him as his two newest friends, Bertha and Bubba.  I am glad he kept his helmet on!

These are not Travelocity gnomes...these are the real deal.  While taking pictures of the surrounding valley, I spotted this gentleman's front steps.  He had quite a collection.  The Swiss gnomes are everywhere...they are the answer to windsocks in the States.  **an update** I have been told by my friend Elaine that these are the 7 Dwarfs. I am an idiot.  Regardless, the yard gnomes are the most popular yard accoutrements in Switzerland.

I love this photo...obviously for the sheer beauty of the background...but also for the vantage point of the photographer.  The subject...one of the kids...looks to be riding off the cliff.  No worries though...a sharp left hand turn at bottom kept kids and adults from "flying".

These next two photos are highlight of one of the coolest things I have seen since we have been here.  There is a storied ritual in this part of Europe where the cows are ceremoniously brought down from the high mountains after a summer of grazing on the rich grasses up in altitude to the low valleys and farms where the animals will eat barn-stored hay and remain safe during the potentially difficult winter months.  The local folks all turn out for this day...the farmers adorn some of their prized cows with crowns of flowers while all get an enormous bell to wear through town.  As an aside...all cows...actually all livestock...wear small bells around their neck to let their owners know where they are at all times.  The bells sound amazing...a very relaxing...almost therapeutic quality.  That must be the reason why you can buy the bells at every tourist shop in town.  Tie one to your dog or cat...let me know how that goes over.
We ended up on a road that was being used as a parade route for these cows.  The small bells that they wear in the summer highlands are replaced with bells the size of a Halloween pumpkin.  Imagine 30 of these large animals strutting down the road wearing these bells...it truly was a cool sight.  Cooler yet was the fact that we had to ride in the parade with them for a few minutes so that we could get to our next destination.

And the short two days of riding comes to an end...with one of my favorites students sound asleep at the train station about 10 feet from the tracks.  Alyssa and I became close this weekend because she struggled a bit going down hill.  Her fear of downhills arose on the first day when she aggressively went down a short hill, lost control of her bike and made a choice to put the bike down on the road instead of riding herself into the river.  I stayed with her all day Saturday.  She was doing great until one of those lose patches of gravel jumped up and bit her on a steep decent.  I thought she might be done right at that moment.  I cleaned her bloodied knees and elbows, bandaged her bruised ego and gave her hug.  We were quite a pair to finish the day together...one with road rash covering large portions of her body and one dealing with an intestinal tract that had gone on strike because of bad seafood.  Alyssa eventually woke up....  

We miss all of you and continue to be incredibly indebted to you for your help with 'stuff' back home.  Doing that 'stuff' has allowed us to be relatively stress free while in Zermatt.  We'd love to hear from you and we'd love to have you share this blog with others looking to stay up on our trip.  Feel free to pass it out!  Until next time.....