Herbstferien Trip (Fall Break)

Now that Jasper has started school, we are bound to a school calendar when it comes to trips. In Germany that means your general schedule is a two week break in the end of October, a week for Christmas, and a couple more breaks around Easter until the school year ends July 20. It starts up again 2nd week of September.

Anyway, we took a trip for this year's Herbstferien to see some Seattle friends currently living in Basel, Switzerland, then drove down into France's Rhone valley to the city of Lyon to meet up with another family from Seattle days who were in town, then we returned back up through Geneva and Bern to finish the week back with the first set of friends in the Bernese Oberland outside Interlaken in the tiny town of Grindelwald which sits in the shadow of the Eiger.

Because I know that if I don't do this RIGHT NOW it will never happen, so here we have some pics and brief commentary.

Basel with Kath, Georg, Claire and Camille.

Lyon and Grenoble with Jason, Ashley, Griffin and Emmaline:

Trail Boo-boo!

Grenoble from the cable car.

Entrance to the AirBnB: behind the red door.

View out the window over Lyon @ sunrise

Geneva, Bern on the return trip to Basel:

Detail on the Bern Munster cathedral

Main street, Bern. Enstein lived on the left between 1903-05 working as a clerk in the patent office while developing the Theory of Relativity.

Thun and Gindelwald with Kath, Georg and the girls:

Jasper takes a shot in Thun

Jasper captures daddy trying to perfectly capture Thun's main street.

Up on the mountain: above the village of Grindelwald. We had to take either a gondola above town to get up to the Pension or drive a nearly-vertical paved hiking trail up through cow pastures.

Our Swiss Hosts!

Jasper and the Eiger in background.

Somehow, cows actually graze at these heights. Fence hopefully will keep them from falling off cliff into town far below.

Kids hiked up to a waterfall, broke off a few massive icicles, and brought them back for Claire to enjoy.

Claire, the mountain girl!

Cassandra, mountain mama!

Georg and Camille

Jasper in front of Wetterhorn

Bacelpa See at the end of the hike.

Kind of lucky to get such a clear day for hiking so late in the Fall.

Then they built this catwalk that juts far out over the abyss. You can see right through the grating, but just in case you missed that, the final panel under your feet is actually clear.

Jasper shows Cody something in this Made for Swiss Travel Brochure image

See how the mountain air brings families together! Such brotherly love.

End of the mountain hike. Jasper's feet soaked and all mildly sunburned. But what a visual feast.

Back in Basel, at the paper museum. Cody practices some calligraphy.

Jasper tries a quill and inkwell out.

On the return, we nearly missed the flight from Basel to Berlin because we spent a tad too long in the Paper Museum, but luckily the plane arrived late so we had plenty of time. Well, we had plenty of time after running OJ-style through the airport shouting "entschuldigung sie!" (excuse us!) at people on the escalators and moving walkways. Kids enjoyed the high energy of it all.