Switzerland Day 2

On Monday morning I took a little walk around Bern. When I got back to Grossmama and Grosspapa's apartment, Dori and Freddie were there with a new bed for Grossmama and Grosspapa. I helped put the bed in, and then we all had lunch. It wasn't until about 3pm that Mom and I headed out for our first excursion. We took the train to Thun, walked around the town and visited the castle. We did not go on the inside tour of this castle, just saw the outside.

Down in the town we happened to see an advertisement for the Niederhorn. A train and gondola would take us up the mountain, then we could ride a scooter down. We thought that sounded like fun, so we took a bus along Lake Thun to the site. Unfortunately by the time we got there, we were too late to do the scooter down the mountain, but they said we could still take the last trip up, spend about 30 minutes at the top, and then take the gondola/train back down. Although we didn't get to ride scooters down the mountain, the ride in the cable train and gondola was fantastic and well worth it. The day was beautiful and the view breathtaking. We could see the Berner Oberland (aka the Swiss Alps) including the Jungfraujoch.

After we got off the Niederhorn, we took the bus to Interlaken and spent a little time walking the main touristy streets with all the shops. It was getting late, so we didn't spend much time there. We took the train direct from Interlaken to Bern and got in at around 9pm.

 A wonderful old wooden bridge in Thun

 The castle in Thun

It's hard to appreciate the steepness of the grade from this photo, but this system is really impressive. A cable pulls one car up a single track as another car is lowered. At the halfway mark, the single track splits to allow the two cars to pass each other.

The train only traveled up the lower half of the Niederhorn. For the even steeper top half of the mountain, we transferred to a gondola. This photo is the scene from inside our gondola, cruising over little mountain chalets and farms with cows. We could hear the cow bells ringing as we passed over top of them.

In the background is Lake Thun on this beautiful day. 

At the top of the Niederhorn we were treated to spectacular views. I especially liked this valley. 

 This is part of the Berner Oberland mountain range which we had such a nice view of from the top of the Niederhorn. I took a photo of the plaque and then tried to get an equivalent shot of the actual range. If you look closely you can just make out the observatory at the Jungfraujoch. The photo below shows my max zoom of the observatory. It was neat to get this perspective, because the next day we traveled to the Jungfraujoch observatory.