Engstligenalp Valley

Last Saturday we decided—okay, I wheedled Brett into it, he wanted to just go swimming at Marzili—to go hiking.  So we packed up our wursts and drove to Adelboden, which is a very lovely place.

The day was beautiful and the sun was sparkly.

So Brett had been kindof weirdly sick the last week after we hiked by Schilthorn, and he had been really weak.  So since he still wasn’t quite 100%, I decided to take Orrin.  Which means Brett took the camera, and I am actually in some of the pictures!  Wild.

So, I actually was hoping to convince Brett to take the gondola up to the valley, or at least take it one way, but Brett was not willing to pay, since “we came to hike, so we are going to hike.”  Kindof hard to argue with that.  So off we go with a hey-ho-ho.  Oh, and by the way, I had no idea Ethne had her doll diaper bag with her until after we had left the place where we parked the van, otherwise she would NOT have kept it with her.

It was a short and easy walk to this viewing spot of the waterfall.

However, continuing up the trail became much more steep and difficult.  And man, with Orrin on my back I was definitely feeling it, I’ll tell you what!  But still, I felt quite mortified that I reallllly wanted to call for a rest when my 4-year-old and 5-year-old were trooping along without a whimper. 

But I persevered (I always want to spell/say that perservered, even though I know it’s wrong) and we came again to a beautiful spot with flowers and the waterfall in view again.

It was so fun to get a shower up by the waterfall.

   

Okay, so we were fairly hungry right from the start, since it was almost lunchtime by the time we got going.  So, even though I demanded a stop for a snack, we were realllly ready to roast our wursts.  However, we got up here and suddenly Brett said, “Dang it.  We just left all the trees behind—no wood.”  So when we got to this little hut, I had Jethro ask the farmer? hut-keeper? cheese-maker? if he knew if there were any grill-spots with wood provided up in the valley (sometimes they have those).  He said no, but that we could have some wood from him.  He was even so kind as to split it into little pieces for us.  Then he showed us where we could go to have our bräteln.

Unfortunately, we also had no sticks to use for holding our wursts, so Brett jimmied some little skewers and set them up on rocks.  They ended up quite delicious, at least to our hungry stomachs.  And Jethro went back to the hut and bought some Alpkäse from the guy, who called him a Jungling (youngling).  Awesome.

Then we walked a little bit further into the Engstligenalp Valley.  It was quite cool looking, a pretty flat valley surrounded by mountains, with lots of boulders.  In fact, there are even some that are marked for climbing, with different markings for different difficulty levels and things, but we didn’t actually go there, we just climbed around on random ones.

Ha ha- pulling Daddy’s ears.

Orrin climbed a little rock by himself and we said, “Now go like this.” and he did--  Cutest thing of my life!!!!!!

The kids played around in the water for awhile, caught some tadpoles and little frogs, built a dam, etc.

Hazel laid down in the water to earn one franc.  Love her face here.  :)

It wouldn’t be a Swiss trail without some cows on it, now would it?

We met this goat as we went up, and on the way down it started following us home.  In fact, we had gone on a ways after we petted it, and then it came barreling down the trail to us, right towards Hazel, and she screamed and jumped out of the way and we all laughed at her.

I’m always surprised just how much faster it is going down than up- every time.  Though going down is much harder on the knees.  And poor Talmage was beat by the end, and was pretty whiny.  But man, we hiked a LONG, STEEP way that day—I was so so impressed with the kids!!

Good day.