Notes from Abroad

My final day in Switzerland was a bit of a rollercoaster, but it turned out to be an absolute blast in the end.

The morning started out with a late-ish wakeup (that’s about 9AM) and running into everyone in the kitchen for breakfast. Though the day was once again pretty rainy and dreary, we were all determined to make the most of our last day in the most beautiful place on earth.

There were so many options: I could go to Trummelbach. I could go to the top of the mountain to see some of the places where they shot 007. I could go into Interlaken to do some shopping. I could just hike the random trails around the campsite. The list goes on.

Lindsay and Skye were planning to do Trummelbach as well, and after meeting up with one of Simon’s friends, Kirsten, we all decided to go together. Simon and Renae had already gone, so they decided to do the cable car ride up to the top of the mountain and take a 2-3 hour hike down.

The one thing they don’t tell you about Trummelbach: plan to get wet. And, depending on how much it’s rained or how warm it’s been in recent days, plan to get soaked. Luckily for us it had been pretty rainy for the last few days, especially in the afternoons, so even though the skies were blue with a few puffy clouds, we all had our rain gear packed with us.

The “hike” to Trummelbach was about 20 minutes from our campsite. It wasn’t much of a hike though – I’d call it more of a walk, but either way it was beautiful. More cute little Swiss houses and farms and two more waterfalls. The walk was supposed to take about 20 minutes but I think it ended up taking us over 40 because we were dawdling and taking a bunch of photos.

Once we got there it actually didn’t look like much of anything. You take an elevator to the 8th or so level and have two more levels to walk up. This place is really cool. It’s basically the largest (publically accessible) indoor glacier waterfall or something like that. The water is crystal clear and flowing so intensely it carves its way through the rocks and caverns of this cliffside. It’s really cool stuff. (see wikipedia)

So after getting pretty soaked at Trummelbach we headed back to our campsite and split up. Skye and Lindsay were going to the top of the mountain, Kirsten was going to take a nap, and I was kind of undecided. I knew I wanted to get some cool Swiss souvenirs, but I also wanted to go to the top of the mountain. I decided to go the souvenir route and head down to Interlaken where I would also stop at the train station to get a ticket to Munich for the next day.

I packed up my stuff, including my laptop because I was planning to find an Internet cafe in the city and headed out. I didn’t realize that I’d taken so many photos at Trummelbach, so about 5 minutes away from the campsite I noticed that I only had space for one more photo on my CF card. Crap. Luckily I had my laptop with me so I plunked down by one of the waterfalls and started to download my photos.

I’ve been using Picasa during this trip – only because Photoshop and Photo Mechanic are way too expensive to put on my netbook. I don’t particularly like it, but it gets the job done for basic downloading.

A third of the way through the download, I noticed the counter on my camera was moving faster than the counter on the computer. Before I knew it my CF card had been wiped and only 103 photos had made it onto my hard drive. I WAS PISSED. All of my Trummelbach photos. Gone.

I thought about walking back there and just taking all of the photos again, but instead I just got really grumpy. I resigned myself to the fact that the photos were gone and that if I wanted to show someone what Trummelbach looked like, I’m sure SOMEONE will have a photo posted on Flickr. Right? Right. So I walked into Lauterbrunnen, still grumpy but trying to remind myself that it wasn’t the end of the world. At least my paragliding photos were safe.

I had a few purchases in mind for when I got to Interlaken, but I wanted to get an idea of the prices in Lauterbrunnen before I went down so I had a point of comparison. I ended up finding this cute little watch shop on the main road in town and never actually made it to the train station or to Interlaken. I got everything I needed right in there and for the best prices that I’ve seen yet. Win. The lady who owned the shop asked me if I wanted to wear my watch or if I wanted to put it in the box. Considering the luck I’d been having so far that day I opted to keep wearing my now 9-year-old Fossil. My Swiss watch will wait until I get home.

After I’d made all of my purchases there really wasn’t a reason for me to go to Interlaken and the train ticket down there is pretty pricey, so instead I decided to hang out in Lauterbrunnen at the little Internet cafe I’d come to love. Still feeling sorry for myself, I bought an afternoon’s worth of wi-fi and a brownie. I sat down on the porch and pulled out my laptop.

I skipped straight past the emails and social networking things and went straight for Google: “recover photos from CF card.” I was determined to get my photos back. After a few hours of fiddling around with stuff and trying this and that I finally realized that I might be able to do it if I mounted the CF card as a drive via a USB card reader instead of just plugging the USB directly into my camera. Lucky for me the Internet cafe had a reader and I gave it a shot.

306 photos recovered. THANK GOD. I can’t tell you how happy I was to see my .CR2s loading into the folder completely unharmed. The program I used was called PhotoRec and it is absolute MAGIC, I tell you. So amazing.

So I mentioned in my last post that we were planning to have a BBQ. When I wrote that there were about 5 of us in on the plans. By the time the actual BBQ rolled around there were a dozen of us. We’d all decided that we’d each bring whatever sort of meat we wanted to grill and one person would be in charge of the coal and another would make a salad. We’d pay those people back. I went to the butcher in town and got myself a skewer of marinated chicken. I still have no idea what the marinade was, but it was so nice to have some food that I actually cooked for once.

With my photos recovered, my food purchased, and my friends all around my mood went from crap-tacular to un-crap-tacular in no time. Just in time for the BBQ.

The BBQ was so much fun and the salad, potatoes, and chicken were amazing. It was great that we were all able to get together for our last night in Lauterbrunnen to just hang out and reminisce about the cool stuff we did during our stay. It was the last time some of us would be together since from Lauterbrunnen, people seemed to be going in all sorts of directions from Munich to Nice to Barcelona, etc. I think the BBQ will be one of my favorite memories from the trip.

Though I didn’t get to see and do everything that I wanted to during my 5 days here in Switzerland, I still had the most amazing time. The day we arrived I mentioned that I would be perfectly content to just lie down in one of the fields and stare up at the sky for an entire day and do you know what? If it weren’t raining I probably would have. On my third day here, after paragliding and exploring Interlaken I said that if I had to leave the next day I would be perfectly content with how I spent my time here. And I still am. I’m sad to leave, but I’ll definitely return as soon as possible.

Tags: Adventures, City, Jounal, Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland