A MAGICAL PLACE – INTERLAKEN SWITZERLAND

Well this is LONG over due! But now that the wedding is out of the way (not that I ever wish it to be over with!), I finally have been able to carve out some time to go through photos and get organized in the blog world again. Moving countries, working full-time, maintaining a blog and youtube channel while planning a wedding is darn near impossible! I did my best, but I kind of feel like I failed haha. But anyways, I’m playing catch up now. We are jumping all the way back to this time last year when Ken and I did a magical 3 week trip through Europe just before we moved from London back to Vancouver. It hard to imagine that we’ve been home over a year now, but we have! We originally set out on this huge adventure because we weren’t really sure when we would get back to Europe and when we would ever get a chance to travel like this again.  A year later, we have a better idea of what the future holds and are very excited for the possibilities. 

But for today, we are looking back on our time in Interlaken, Switzerland. This spot kind of happened accidentally when we found ourselves on a route that would require a pit stop for a night or two. We had heard of this spot because many of our friends had been more, so with the recommendation in our minds, we hopped on a train to the tiny charming town. We booked a hotel on our phones on the train there (as we did most of the trip) and then sat back and enjoyed the incredible scenery on the trains route.

To get a better idea of what the place looks like I would high recommend watching our video from our time there. We did a much better job with the video than the photos on this leg of the trip. Watch the video HERE or scroll down to the bottom of the post to watch 🙂

The town itself is pretty small and very much reminded of a spot close to home called Whister. Whistler is a small ski town about an hour drive from our home in Vancouver that we often visit for a quick getaway. Interlaken was a european version of it. We LOVED it. All the buildings were typical swiss, surrounded by greenery, incredibly blue rivers running through. Even the trains were beautiful! Very clean, big and efficient. 

This was the hotel we stayed at. Just a few minutes walk from the town centre and a few steps from local restaurants.  I think I probably picked it because of the cute blue window shakers and bright red flowers at each window 🙂 Even the paint details under the roof overhang! So pretty!

We were so excited to finally be on this adventure that we basically dropped our bags, freshened up and headed back out the door. We did a little research, asked our hotel about what we could do and even asked a few locals questions about the place before deciding to go on a hike.  We were told Harder Kulm was the best view of the town from above and it certainly did not disappoint. 

We took a quick train ride to the bottom of the mountain and hopped on the funicular up into the clouds! Again, you can see all this in the video HERE

At the top there is a look out point that over hangs off the edge of the mountain. If you have trouble with heights, this might not be your thing, but if you can get there, it’s so worth it! Pictures really don’t do it justice. We hung out at the top for awhile, taking in the view and sipping on a beer.

We couldn’t believe our luck with the weather either. We almost didn’t bother with this leg of the trip simply because the weather report was nothing but rainstorms and thunder for the days we were to be there, but we gambled and went for it. It turned out to be pure bliss! Nothing but sunshine and a few pretty clouds. We did get a few drops of rain the next day but considering the fact we were between to mountains, we felt pretty darn lucky to experience Interlaken in the way we did.

We ended our first day in Interlaken with a huge rainbow over the water as we were heading back to the funicular back into town. Sometime or something was really wanting us to fall in love with this magical town.

The second day there was our first full day there and our only plans was to adventure around the Swiss Alps. Doesn’t sounds like a bad day right? Not at all. I don’t know if it was the time of year or the bad weather forecast, but we had this Swiss Alps hike all to ourselves! The only people we saw were the people that live in these cute homes in the hills. And they were all SO friendly! Quite a few of them were outside gardening or doing house chores and each and everyone of them said hello to us as we walked by their cute homes. 

The spot we ended up in was called Grindewald. We took a old fashion train all the way up the mountains (about a 30 minutes ride from the centre of Interlaken) to this very cute little town and were immediately lost. After wandering aimlessly for probably about 30 minutes we finally found a map and a tourist station that could send us in the right direction. We picked a spot on the map, and worked our way through the maze of hikes we could take to get there. We did get lost on the hiking trails many times as well (nothing was marked all that well) but we didn’t mind. We eventually came across a small restaurant where we had a bite to eat and a beer before taking off again.

Sadly, we only spent about a day and a half in Interlaken and although it was a bit of a accidental trip, it turned out to be one of our favourite parts of the trip. And that’s saying a lot! We went to some pretty amazing places after this! Fingers crossed we will be planning a trip back before we know it 🙂

Make sure to watch the video! It’s probably one of my favourites 🙂

Xo, Andrea