Lauterbrunnen Valley...

So, the clouds had socked us in and it was time to move on from Zermatt to our next destination - the Lauterbrunnen Valley. This valley would turn out to be our base camp for all activities in the Bernese Oberland. The original plan was to spend a day in the valley and the ascend the cliffs and spend the rest of the time hiking alp to alp and staying in mountain huts and inns. Well, the weather and food poisoning had other ideas which we'll get into later!

We arrived in Interlaken Ost to much rain. We wanted to walk around Interlaken a bit and find an internet cafe to check out the weather and figure out where we were going to stay that night. Interlaken is an interesting city and was much larger than I thought it would be. We had planned on seeing the lakes but they were so far away from where we were we decided against it. Instead we walked around town just to check things out and then headed back to the train station to catch our train into the Lauterbrunnen valley (another train that isn't covered by our Eurail pass - but is deeply discounted with it). Once in the Valley we dropped our packs and headed out to explore. We located the internet access, coop, and tourist info center and continued on down the valley to view some of the waterfalls (of the 70 odd falls they claim to have in the valley!).

As we reached Stechelburg we saw the boot with lavender above - it seemed to be a trend in the area. This one was at the post office/bus stop but we saw a number of others during our travels over the two weeks. At that post box there was a great place with all sorts of maps, hiking information and what not. We filled up on paper and continued on our way. One of the maps was a quick (or was supposed to be a quick) hike to three really nice waterfalls.

We decided to try to do the hike with the limited daylight we had left. After about a hour of going up and up and up we realized that we'd only made it 1/3 of the way to the first falls and decided that we're better off heading back and finding dinner (because it was at least a 3 hour walk back to town!).

On our way back we passed the Avalanche shelter above. Most of the valley had natural protections built into the hillsides and above the other towns, however, this area of the valley had very steep walls there they couldn't plant any tree breaks or affix any avalanche fences so they have to provide a place for folks to shelter in case there was an avalanche. These were every .25 miles or so for a while and were within a quick dash if one needed. Fortunately, it was summer here and there was no snow to be in any danger.

Anyways, the walk back to the hotel was uneventful. We capped our night off with some awesome fondue and a few beers (which, by the way, beers are cheaper than water in these places!) which was the perfect way to relax. We headed back to our room and just crashed. Hoping for better weather tomorrow!

Lessons Learned:
1. Internet connectivity at the tourist center is rip off!
2. The campsite at the edge of town has the best food prices - too bad it's an hours walk from our hotel.