We had allowed ourselves two days in Interlaken to slow down a bit and enjoy the Alps, so the second day we took another cogwheel train.  This one left from immediately next to our hotel, and took us up to the lower region called Schynige Platte.

This train is very slow, but that’s because of the incredibly steep grades it hauls itself up.

Because of the old-fashioned wooden seatsness of it all, I was put slightly in mind of the romantic train ride we did in Kyoto, but this was was actually a bit better than that – you didn’t have an announcer shouting at you the whole time, and no one attempted to sell us photos of ourselves.  I still wouldn’t necessarily call this “romantic”, per se, but the views were pretty great.

The point of coming up here was to go for a hike.  There’s an alpine garden and a trail along a fairly narrow ridgeline.  There’s also a picture frame, so you can take a properly framed photo of the Alps.

We tried to do a Magritte, but I don’t think we quite got it right.

At any rate, the hike was very pretty, and especially once you got up to the ridgeline, very narrow.

Normally I don’t just throw in a bunch of pictures without saying something between each one, but – come on.

The one difficulty, as can be seen in these pictures compared to the one from the day before, is that it was threatening to rain.  And shortly after we took this one, it went from “threatening” to “raining pretty damn hard.”  Of course at the maximum distance from the train station on the out-and-back loop we were on.

So was slogged our way back in the rain, skipped the alpine garden, and squished on to the train for the ride back down.  At which point, of course, the weather turned gorgeous.

I mentioned that we had mostly skipped the town of Interlaken, the center of which feels very much like the Virginia Beach of Switzerland.  However, we HAD signed up for a chocolate making class that afternoon.

The shop where we did the class was promising.  Lots of interesting decor, funky hipster vibe.  The class itself was… fine.  Really.  We got to make chocolate, and we got to eat chocolate.  But you could tell it was geared towards the 12 and under crowd who made up most of the rest of the attendees.

We ended up with six chocolate bars, which we then carried around with us for the remainder of the trip in a little white paper bag, which had to be maneuvered on top of our other luggage the whole time.  Keep Chekhov’s bag of chocolate in mind.

While we waited for the chocolate to set, we had some time to walk around and see some of the less touristy bits of town along the river, which were really quite nice.

And then it was zoom zoom again off to our next city – Lucerne!  We arrived in time to have a nice evening walk along the lake there, and then off to bed.