today's improvisation topic is: "backpacking"

okay, so i got back from my backpacking trip alive, which is good, but also a day early, which is annoying. i really did try my best, it just didn't go as planned. at all. not even a little bit.

i probably should have been able to read the writing on the wall when people started dropping like flies throughout last week. by the thursday afternoon, it looked very much like i was going to be by myself on friday, so i had pretty much resigned myself to just coming with the saturday group and doing a 1-nighter and be done with it. but, when i got home, i got a call from maurice, who apparently was still planning on coming, so i threw my pack together at the last minute, and met him at the train station friday morning. and even though it seems like pretty much everything after that went strangely (if not just wrong), i think the two of us had a pretty good time nonetheless, so it was worth it.

the train pulled into grindlewald at around 11:00, and we started walking down towards grund, to cross the river and start climbing out of the valley. remember that grund is at about 800m elevation (this will be moderately important later). so, we go on our merry way, and i'm a little curious as to why it looks like we're on more of a bike path than a hiking trail... turns out i unwittingly planned us into the "tourist region of switzerland" and there was a train going pretty much parallel to the whole route i had originally selected for that day. which, one should also note, was pretty short (about 4.5-5 hours by the book, but we seemed to be moving significantly faster than that. also irking me was the fact that every half hour or so we would pass a little restaurant. not exactly my first mental image of "wilderness."

but as we were nearing one of said restaurants, there were a couple of small cabin-like structures (can't have been more than 2.5x3m) which appeared to be for aging cheese. one of the doors was hanging open, and the stereotypical red-haired five year old girl was running buckets of water back and forth. so we peeked in, and found the old man, long sleeve flannel shirt, six inch grey beard and all (remember that it was probably between 90 and 95 degrees out), doing whatever it is that people making cheese normally do. maurice speaks swiss german also, so he exchanged some small talk with the guy, and we ended up buying a little wheel of the cheese (called "muechli;" neither of us had ever heard of it, but 600g for 8 francs is a steal by anyone's standards, and come on, we bought it directly from the crazy old man who made it. that was pretty cool.

somewhere else along the conversation that they had, the guy had suggested an alternate route we could take up to the eigergletcherstatione. so we stopped, looked at the map, and saw that it was pretty much parallel to the route i had planned, but went up higher. so we gave it a shot.

it was much more of what i had expected, up closer to the waterfalls, dirt path, occasional herd of cows, the works. the only strange part was that we kept going up, and up, and up, and up, and... well, you get the idea... and what was stranger, was that there were plenty of people on the trail, but they were all coming down. we didn't see a single person moving in the same direction as we were. but we kept going, and eventually made it all the way up to the glacier. which, i must admit, was pretty impressive. but it also must be mentioned that it was at 2325m (remember where we started? yeah, actually, that *is* a lot). and the black clouds started to gather.

now, my plan had been based on the assertion by one of the girls that while "savage camping," as they call it, was technically not allowed in switzerland, it was okay above 2000m, and as long as you weren't bothering anyone or conspicuously obstructing the view and picked up after yourselves, it was generally fine. maurice, however, didn't seem too convinced, and also thought it might be reasonably exposed and cold up where we were, so we decided to try our luck down closer to the tree line. while i probably would have liked to have stayed up higher, there really wasn't anywhere to hide, and most of the land area was on a pretty steep incline anyway.

as it turns out, it was very good that we took the old man's advice, because when we got back down to the "kleine scheidegg," which i had thought was the low peak/crest we were going to walk over that day, it was basically a miniature amusement park surrounding one of the major stops on the jungfraubahn (most expensive train in europe; goes all the way up to the jungfraujoch). well, so, that's about where the tree line was, but you can't really camp right next to a train station, so we continued on, and continued not finding any reasonable place to put a tent which wasn't either completely exposed and obvious, on somebody's private property, or on a 50 degree incline. and it kept getting worse, because by this point we were getting closer to the next town, wengen. and the sun was going down, since it was about 7:30, which wasn't helping either.

maurice mentions that he thinks organized campgrounds are marked on the map, so i finally cave, disappointed, but realizing that this is pretty much our only option, and we look for one on the map. unfortunately, there aren't any in wengen, but there are two in lauterbrunnen, which is still an hour and a half away, down at the bottom of the valley. without much choice, we go for it, but i'm starting to feel the nine hours of walking we'd already done, and am thinking about pitching the tent in the dark, when i notice that the little yellow signs pointing towards wengen have trains pictured on them, meaning they actually lead us past the train station. so i decided we were going to cheat and take the train from wengen down to lauterbrunnen, which was probably a good idea.

found the campground, which curiously was mostly composed of trailerpark style modular constructions that they rented rooms in, but there was a grass parking lot way at the back where one could pitch a tent, so we ended up staying there for the night. but not before encountering two more atrocities of tourist hell... when trying to figure out what the story was on registration, we went up to talk to the bar tender (yes, there was a bar at the "campground"), who apparently didn't understand swiss german, so maurice ended up talking with some other girl who he got passed off to. then, once we got everything set up and settled, it was getting pretty dark, and we realized that they had spotlights shining on the waterfall across the canyon, so that you could see how beautiful it was, even in the middle of the night. admittedly, it was quite beautiful, but please, that's just plain crazy talk. spotlights on a freaking waterfall? wow.

saturday morning we get up, clean up, eat some breakfast, and i go try to figure out how to settle our bill. the office is actually open this time, and i find the same lady maurice had talked to last night, but apparently she doesn't speak french [rolls eyes]. so with a lot of hand signals, and a couple of german words, we eventually got through it.

there were three other girls that were supposd to be joining us at the train station in lauterbrunnen sometime between 11:00 and 11:30, but it was nearing 11 and we still hadn't gotten any response from the times we had tried to call sylviane, so we strapped on our packs and headed over anyway. about halfway there, we get a text message from rebecca (whose number we didn't previously have), saying she was in the restaurant across from the station having a cup of coffee. we found her, but she was by herself. turns out, the other two had decided that their feet hurt and so not to come, but didn't say anything until the morning of...

so, there we were, three people, one of whom needed to be back in yverdon by saturday night (maurice's mother's surprise birthday party was planned for sunday), so two who were planning on camping, and we had pretty much two of everything, including tents. eventually, we decide the best thing to do is to stash a whole bunch of stuff in a train station locker, do a day hike/loop and all three of us go back on the train that evening. sad, yes, but could have been worse.

with lighter loads, we started walking towards trummelbach, since that was the whole reason i planned this trip in the first place (cue foreboding music). it sounds really cool; apparently there's a series of waterfalls completely *inside* the mountain, so you go into the caves and see it, and i thought it would be something neat to get a look at. unfortunately though, since we were haveing such a grand old time chatting and whatnot while walking, the next sign i saw said it was now 20 minutes behind us, and i have no idea how we missed it.

we had been walking along the valley floor, and decided it might be nice to get a little bit of climbing in, but as the valley is more like a canyon than a valley, pretty much any climbing was going to involve a lot of climbing, and we were standing under the schilthornbahn cable car, so we took it up to muerren, with the intention of walking back down to lauterbrunnen, and trying again to get to trummelbach. it was a nice walk, and the views were fantastic, but about 2/3 of the way down, those black clouds we had seen friday evening suddenly reappeared and this time they let loose like you wouldn't believe. we ran down the mountain and were soaked to the bone by the time we got to lauterbrunnen at about 5:00. walking the three kilometers to trummelbach in that rain didn't seem to appealing, so i asked about a bus. well, the next one didn't leave until 5:20, and the thing closed down at 6:00 anyway, so we eventually came to the conclusion that we had unfortunately missed it this time around. had a hot chocolate in the restaurant across from the train station, and caught the train back to lausanne.

someday, i swear i'm going on a real backpacking trip. i just can't figure out why it should be this hard...