Adventure/roadtrip with the boy is booked. We have one week and the final destination is Lyon to visit a friend, so we are booked into an airbnb there for three nights.
On the way we will head to Wengen, maybe doing a detour to walk over the Titlis suspension bridge on the way. Two nights in Wengen and one in Mürren. There is absolutely loads to do there. We may do the walk from Männlichen to Kleine Scheidegg, possibly take the train through the Eiger and up the Jungfrau, visit Piz Gloria on the Schilthorn and do a Jet Boat tour in Interlaken. In preparation we watched On Her Majesty‘s Secret Service and we may watch the Eiger Sanction.
My wife will fly into Lyon at the weekend and drive back with us.
On the way back we will go via Beaune to top up the wine cellar and stop over on the Swiss side of Lake Constance.
Sounds great! Have fun!
For things I wouldn‘t normally be doing on holiday, today we rode up the mountain James Bond style on top of a csble car, walked from Männlichen up to the Eigergletscher, took the Eiger Express cable car to Grindelwald and back up the mountain and the funicular train back down to Wengen
Continuing on the Bond theme, the next day we took the train back down from Wengen to Lauterbrunnen (with apologies to the engineers out there since it is actually a rack railway, not a funicular as I hastily described it earlier).
In Lauterbrunnen we took the cable car and narrow-gauge railway to Mürren, where we dumped the bags and headed for the Schilthorn.
Adventure!
I haven’t been there since 1987 when I hiked 5 hours up the mountain and overnighted in a hut with a multi-mattress bunk room and outside toilets.
Up at the top in the revolving restaurant Piz Gloria you are peering through the golden rings like Sir Hillary aka 007 but instead of a bevy of beauties you are looking past the tourists out to the vast mountain landscape.
Some people find the exhibition boring. It must be because I was 7 years old when the film hit the screen but the whole background of how the film was made is fascinating to me. Diana Rigg (who couldn’t ski) on a sledge on her knees and Willy Bogner skiing backwards while filming her close up. Magic!
But even more adventurous than the Schilthorn, despite the cinema history and majestic views, is the Thrill Walk in Birg on the way up/down and also a location in OHMSS. Etched into the cliffside, a walk that most people can navigate with special vertigo tests for the adventurous.
On the day on which we planned to depart (which we didn‘t in the end, due to higher powers) we took a jet boat ride out on Lake Brienz. Most enjoyable, and to recover, a steam paddleboat ride and a swim.
After the Jetboat ride we would have been heading off to Lyon to visit a friend. On the way, he texted me with a photo of a positive Covid test.
Bugger!
What now?
The nearest hotel to the Jetboat quay looked nice, right on the lake and, as luck would have it, they were not fully booked. So I booked the rooms at the inn, made a call to Lyon to cancel the accommodation there, cancelled my wife‘s flight to Lyon losing all of the extortionate last minute air fare minus taxes (and Lufthansa sre still not profitable?), booked a rail ticket for her to Bern where we will meet up tomorrow.
Never been to Bern before…
What an adventure!
I had an adventure with my son today.
We got the train with our bikes to Penrith station, and then cycled off-road, cross country to our exciting wilderness destination: centre parks Whinfell Forest!
I asked my 12 year old son to estimate the proportion of centre parks customers who had taken that means of transport to facilitate their arrival, and he said about 0.001% of them.
Then he changed his mind and said maybe only two apart from us in the entire history of the place!
Especially because there were several large signs saying ‘no access to centre parks’ on the way in.
My wife and daughters will be meeting us here later on.
As a lifelong rock climber, I have never felt tempted to watch the Eiger sanction.
“In his review in the Chicago Sun-Times , Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars, writing, "It has a plot so unlikely and confused that we can’t believe it for much more than 15 seconds at a time. Playboy magazine described the film as "a James Bond reject” […] Joy Gould Boyum of The Wall Street Journal complained that the film “situates villainy in homosexuals and physically disabled men”,[36] and Pauline Kael of New Yorker magazine described the film as “a total travesty”.[36].”
Actually, as luck would have it, the Eiger Sanction was not available for streaming so we ended up watching North Face, a gripping, if tragic, true story of the unsuccessful attempt of Toni Kurz and his team to scale the north face in 1936.
Kurz died hanging from a rope within talking distance of his rescuers (the rest of the party having already been killed by an avalanche).
The route he took was followed by Harrer two years later in 1938 when he and his comrades became the first to reach the summit via the north face, almost missing the summit and toppling over the south face in the fog.
I would get vertigo myself.
Harrer’s book, The White Spider, is well worth a read if you haven’t already. Should be a good deterrent for anyone who hasn’t already decided that the Eiger is a thoroughly unpleasant place to be!
Thanks for that, I‘ll put it on my reading list. I read his main autobiography years ago but wasn’t aware of this book
Harrer describes in his other book ‘7 years in Tibet’ how he was stranded in Tibet on an expedition as war broke out and became tutor to the current Dalai Lama when the Dalai Lama was a child.
For anyone who wants an alpine climbing adventure without any gear or technical skills or experience, it’s possible to hire a guide to take you up via ferrata in many parts of the Alps - iron ladders that can take you safely up multi-pitch rock climbs.
Yes that was the biography of his that I read years ago and the story for the film with Brad Pitt.