May 13th brought decent weather and a perfect day for seeing the surrounding villages of Wilderswil, Grindelwald, Interlakken, and Thun.  We started at the Trummelbachfalle – (Trummelbach Water Falls) in Lauterbrunnen (just 10 minutes from Wilderswil) – This is a huge water fall located inside a mountain cliff, accessible by elevator and illuminated by electric lights.  It’s an amazing hike through a mountain that was first discovered and made available to the public in about 1900.  Awesome is the only word…

From the falls we headed into Interlaken for a quick trip to the grocery store.  We show Kathleen here with the cart because it was a 20 minute ordeal for her to get the cart into the store.  The grocery carts are chained together with individual chains that connect to the one behind it.  There must be a terrible theft problem for these carts.  Perhaps people use them as chair lifts to climb mountains, or as boats to get across the lake.  Maybe the local teenagers use them to race down alpen cliffs… Whatever the case may be, after pushing and pulling and asking and watching we learned that you have to put a coin into a small, almost invisible slot in the handle.  The coin disengages the chain, and you can roll the cart away. Which, by the way, has swivels on all four wheels – way nice!  When you return the cart and push the chain connector back in, your coin is then able to be removed….  Clever, those Swiss.  They should try their hand at watches, too….

After putting our dinner food away, we headed down the lake on an amazing, terrifying, swirvy drive right out of a James Bond movie to a beautiful lake side castle near the city of Thune.  The castle was closed, so we walked around the gardens and then played on the jungle gym located right outside the castle entrance…. Funny… thie girls loved this playground – all of them.  They climbed and played and laughed for almost an hour!!  They clearly needed some down time from seeing and learning and struggling with new languages.

They needed to play!

After dinner, while Caroline was “at school” the rest of us had a nice walk around Wilderswil.  It’s a beautiful, old (1500’s) town.