This post title is a touch misleading, as the one place we didn’t go was the city of Interlaken.  Instead, we explored (spoiler) both of the two valleys above Wilderswil – Grindlewald and Lauterbrunen.

Honestly, it would have been a spoiler for us too, at the start of the day – there’s no way we would have SET OUT to travel quite as far as we actually did.

We started the day by catching the train up to Grindlewald, an impossibly picturesque town located, well… here.

But this view CLEARLY wasn’t scenic enough, so we boarded a gondola to the summit of First, (pronounced “feerst”) a peak just north of town.

Getting there.  But how scenic would it be if we got those two knuckleheads out of the picture?

Pretty goddamn scenic, that’s what.  The whole day was basically like this – the weather was perfect, the views were stunning.  Easily my favorite day in a trip full of amazing ones.

One of the reasons you go up First in particular is that there are a lot of super fun ways to get back DOWN, the only one of which I managed to take a picture of is the one we didn’t use.

Instead, we first took a zipline from the summit down to the FIRST gondola stop below the summit, Schreckfeld.  Then at Schreckfeld we boarded a mountain tricycle.  This is an amazing experience where you barrel down a narrow mountain track while trying to keep your eyes on the road and off of, you know, the Alps.

It would have been slightly MORE amazing, however, had we not ended up behind an exceptionally timid rider who moved at an incredibly slow pace, and frequently came to a complete stop.  And since the track is way too narrow for passing, that meant that she managed to collect over a dozen riders all poking along behind her trying to to lose all of their momentum on a flat stretch.

The cycle ride takes you to Bort, where we sadly did NOT stop to buy a souvenir license plate,  but happily boarded our THIRD means of transport down the mountain, a trottibike!  I almost got a picture of this one.

I mean, you can see the handlebars.  A trottibike is basically a scooter with souped up brakes.  And the brakes were needed.  I kind of can’t believe they let us do this.

From Bort back down to Grindlewald is quite a ways, and they just handed us scooters and helmets and said “Have fun, see you at the bottom!” (And by “just handed” I mean “in exchange for quite a lot of money.”)  But still – it’s a fun ride! Nearly two and a half miles, and easily the best of the three.

Arriving in Grindlewald, it was time for a nice hearty lunch.  (And “hearty” is definitely the watchword with the Swiss cuisine we tried.)
And with that, it was time for more gratuitous theme park rights on the side of the Alps.  We headed up a gondola on the opposite side of the valley to Pfingstegg, which boasted both a mountain toboggan ride and a “fly-line”, which is kind of a slower zip line that curves around through the forest.

The fly line was fun!  The mountain coaster would probably have been MORE fun if I hadn’t gotten stuck behind a Spanish grandmother who kept bringing her sled to a full stop.  It was kind of our day for that, sadly.  We also photographed an extremely patient cow.

All the cows really do wear the stereotypical Heidi-ass cowbells, by the way.

Having fly-lined, mountain-coastered, trotti-biked, zip-lined, and tricycled, we realized it was only about three o’clock, and what should we do next?  Well, why not take a gondola up to the high point that separates the Grindlewald valley from the next one over?

Absolutely no reason, that’s why.

And once again, the Swiss rail app proved invaluable.  Drop the pin on top of a goddamn mountain, press go, and you have your bus ticket and your gondola pass all set in your phone.

This peak is called “Mannlichen,” and has a very nice 90 minute hike leading deeper into the mountains.  Why not?  Let’s do that!

Dear lord.  Also, don’t forget you can click on these pictures to make them bigger.

The end of the hike was a spot called Kleine Scheidegg which had a quaint little train station and a historic cogwheel railway down the far side of the mountain into the Lauterbrunen valley. And since the last train was fairly early, we opted to hop onto that rather than having dinner at the top of the mountain.

So – now we were in Lauterbrunen.  There was still one cheese-related dish I wanted to try, and that was raclette, which is basically the cheese of the same name poured over potatoes, and often pickles.

And it was everything I hoped for.  We also got a nice light Caprese salad just to have some (checks notes) cheese with our cheese.

AND we had a view of this amazing waterfall right from our table.

(The view was actually substantially BETTER than this from our table – I took this from the train station later.)

One train back to Wilderswill and we had a chance to think about what we had actually done that day.  Google isn’t great for plotting maps of routes where you use multiple modes of transport, but here’s approximately what we did:

We started at the upper left, took a train to Grindlewald, a gondola to First, zip-line to mountain cycle to trottibike back down to Grindlewald, gondola up to Phingstegg and back down, bus to Grindlewald terminus, then a gondola up to Mannlichen, hiked to Kleine Scheidegg, cogwheel railway down to Lauterbrunen, and then convenional train back to where we started.

Google wont let me plot a route all the way down from Kleine Scheidegg to Lauterbrunnen no matter WHAT I do, because apparently it thinks the last bit just isn’t possible to do at all on foot.

But more to the point – this is an objectively nuts itinerary.  We would have been crazy to plot it intentionally.  When would we have time to even look at the scenery?

Friends – we looked at a lot of scenery.  Maybe it was a bit accidental, but my goodness – it was great.