Grindelwald

For the second part of the vacation I went back to Grindelwald. Instead of staying in the town itself, I stayed some distance outside of town up in the hills. I think that was much more pleasant as it avoided the tourist crowds. The drive to Grindelwald went via the Albula, San Bernardino, and Sankt Gotthard passes. It made for a long, but very enjoyable day.


The first day was rainy so I went to Luzern to revisit the Verkehrshaus musuem and wander though downtown.


The last day was left for climbing the Schilthorn. Last year, I hiked down it and I felt the whole rest of the year like I had cheated. This time I was going to go up.

It was difficult and I felt like I wanted to die a lot of the time, but I made it to the top. Once there, it felt great and I didn't have to worry about another year's worth of lingering guilt.


The rest of the pics are: here, here, and here.

St Moritz

The first part of this year's Swiss vacation was spent in the Engadin region near St Moritz. On the way down there, I stopped off in Liechtenstein, known as the boringest place on Earth. I had hoped to find an ATM, get some francs and look for souvenirs, but failing to find an ATM after 20min, I headed back out of town. The remainder of the drive down into Switzerland was quite nice with great scenery and roads, driving via the Fluela and Julier passes. St Moritz is a nice town, but very glitzy and feels a bit like a brand new, quaint swiss town. I found the surrounding area to be much more interesting.


Day one was spent hiking down and around Piz Nair, which was a good acclaimation to the elevation. And afterwards hiked to the Morteratsch glacier.



Day two was spent doing short hikes at Munt Pers and Mouttas Muragl. Both were interesting hikes, but at over 10000ft, the first hike was quite demanding.


The pics from these days can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

Weekend in Munich

I had a meeting in Munich and so I decided to drive down so that I'd be closer for my upcoming adventure to Switzerland. What I had not expected was the amount of traffic on a Saturday in Germany. I got to Bavaria quickly enough, but as soon as I crossed the Main, traffic came to a crawl. I tried detouring off the autobahn a few kms, but when I got back on, I was next to the same cars as before. Eventually I ended up detouring onto a different autobahn. When I came across the sign for Bad Windsheim with my hopes for lunch in Munich already in ruins, I figured I had no choice but to get off and visit my old town.
It was a nice and unexpected little diversion, but I wasn't able to find my old house due imperfect memory.

Next onto Munich. I spent a very hot afternoon touring the centre and saw the major sites there.


Then did Schloss Nymphenburg (mostly under renovation), the Residenz, the modern musuem (not as exiciting as advertised) and the Bavarian National Museum. Here is a swan.

Along the way, I managed to get yelled at by an old man for harming the environment by not switching my car off while stopped to look at a map.

The best part though was the long evenings spent in the biergarten enjoying the warm summer weather.