Week... at least we went to Switzerland

“Hey Corey, wake up, you’re going to be late to catch the tram!”… I was late… I hurriedly packed my bags for the trip and ran after Mitchell for the tram. However, he wasn’t able to keep the doors open and I watched him flash past me on the tram. I walked, dejectedly, to the next stop and luckily for me, there was still another tram that was running. However, it did not go to the Bonn Hauptbahnhof, it went to Beuel. Still, it was faster than running, so I hopped aboard the tram and made my way into the city. By the time I reached the station I was 20 minutes late for the train to Switzerland, but I lucked out again, the train was 40 minutes late. Everyone started laughing at me when I arrived and we all joked about and waited for the train to arrive. Finally, we boarded the train and made our way to Switzerland. Over-night trains are tragic… It is just hard to sleep on trains and I couldn’t do it for some reason. So when we arrived to Switzerland I was exhausted, but WE WERE IN SWITZERLAND!

We got off of the train and made our way to the hostel. This hostel was far from the city center and near the hike we wanted to do. We got to the hostel, got situated, and then went to go get breakfast from a grocery store. I got a banana and musli, the important part is the musli. We then went to our hike and got on our way. Switzerland is absolutely one of the prettiest, most gorgeous places I have ever been to. We hiked up and every view was simply breathtaking. It felt so surreal that I could not believe it was real. We made our way up, and the girls were pretty worn out, but Mitchell and I were just getting started. This is when we decided to split up, they would take the cable car up and we would hike up the rest of the mountain, which was about 4000-5000 feet of elevation change. So, we split ways. There were trail markers but no real trail. It just kind of, went up the mountain. We clambered and crawled our way up and we saw more breathtaking views. This hike was not easy. Snow covered some parts of the trail and it was hard to traverse because I did not have proper hiking shoes so I would just slip all over the place. We kept going until we made it to a giant snow bowl that was where the path should be. We made it that far already that we felt close to the peak, so we decided to just go for it. We climbed up snow to the best of our ability in a pretty vertical direction. My hands and feet were freezing, but I would not give up that easily. It got to the point where if we kept going straight up the ice bowl we wouldn’t be able to make it, so we started climbing up the side of the mountain by pulling on thick grass that had deep roots. We climbed for what seems like hours on end, and finally made it to the top of the snow bowl area. But by that time, we were already too late to catch the last cable car down. We waved at Lexie, Shannon, and Ibk as we saw them in the last cable car heading down the mountain. We were semi-stranded at the top of a peak without a clear way down. We considered climbing to the top, but we opted out of that idea for safety reasons. I figured that we would be able to take the other path down, but unfortunately for us, it was just as snowy. We started down the other side, but had to turn back around because we couldn’t find the second trail. So, we climbed back up to the chapel and our only option was to go down the snow bowl. At this point, we were out of water and dehydrated. We both felt a little lightheaded, which wasn’t good. We both had thoughts that we would have to get heli-vaced out there. But we continued on. Mitchell led the way by crab walking his way down, but following his steps was hard because the snow was loose where he had been. So, I went for it. I started sliding down the snow bowl, and to be frank, it was SO MUCH FUN! Here we were, two college students, sliding down a snow bowl, should be dead at this point, just going for it. Eventually after enough sliding, we made it back to where it became a “trail” again and we knew we were safe. Now we just had to climb back down, then continue on the rest of the three-hour hike back down to the starting point. This is where the musli came in clutch for us. I completely forgot about the musli until now, and I pulled it out and it somehow gave us enough “sustenance” to continue on. Oh, also for the past few hours, Mitchell’s phone was dead, so we had no way to communicate with anyone. We rushed back, and somehow made it back to the hostel in one piece. The girls welcomed us back and Shannon had spaghetti made for us. It was delicious. Too tired to do anything, we showered, ate, and pasted out.

 

The next day was more relaxing. We just stayed in Lucerne for the day, but that does not mean that we had any less fun. We saw the sights to see in Lucerne and stumbled across a track, so naturally, we raced each other. Oh, and we rented pedal boats. We pedaled out into the middle of the mountain lake and the water was so clear, but freezing because it was a mountain lake. Even though it was freezing, we still jumped in. As soon you entered the water, everything went numb. Breathing got hard, and you just felt awful, but it was still fun. We finished playing around in the water, pedaled our way back, and went to go grab our stuff from the hostel. After getting our stuff we went out for Ibk’s birthday dinner and walked around Lucerne at night. We then made our way to the train station and headed back to Germany. More night trains, yay. This was the best final big trip I could have asked for before leaving the program.