The Top of Europe

11,333 feet above sea level. An UNESCO World Heritage Site. Jungfraujoch. Pretty freakin’ cool!

We visited Lauterbrunnen and Jungfraujoch today. This morning, we woke up with a plan to go to Schilthorn because the forecast looked decent for that summit last night. However, we checked the webcams this morning and Schilthorn was completely cloudy and visibility was low. I decided to look at Jungfraujoch’s webcams and things seemed way clearer over there. Jungfraujoch was definitely the more expensive journey, but in the end, it was 100% worth it because we could actually see stuff up there instead of just fog.

From Interlaken, Lauterbrunnen was a quick 25 minute or so train ride. It’s a cute little quintessentially Swiss town. We decided we’d explore it when we got back from Jungfraujoch. We caught the train up to Kleine Scheidegg station, then switched over to the Jungfraujoch Railway and rode that the rest of the way up to the highest railway station in Europe, which is also on the highest mountain peak in Europe!

They have several attractions you can enjoy there. There was an area for people to go skiing/snowboarding or snow tubing. We didn’t do that, but we could see them from atop the Sphinx Terrace! This is an astronomical observatory, and it’s the second highest one in all of Europe.

There’s also an Ice Palace, where there were several ice sculptures to look at. The floors, walls, ceilings of this area is made of entirely ice! The floor definitely felt slick, but at the same time, it felt weirdly artificial … but they *claim* it’s entirely ice. Who knows! But it was neat to see, nonetheless.

Some other fun things to look at were the history of the building of this area and the railway. There was also a cool snow globe in this area.

And finally, of course, the absolute star of this show. The breathtaking panoramic view of the Jungfrau-Aletsch mountain range. Here, we could also see the Aletsch Glacier. This glacier is the largest glacier in the Alps – it is 22km (just over 13 1/2 miles in American) long, and 12 billion tons of ice can be found here.

We were so, so, so lucky to be blessed with good weather finally on our last day in Switzerland. The clouds parted and the sun came out just for us! It was a really beautiful day, 10/10 would do again. We enjoyed ourselves a lot.

After descending back down to Lauterbrunnen, we had dinner at one of the restaurants in town. I got a burger and fries, but Kiley’s dish of pasta with raclette, potatoes and bacon was waaaaay better than mine. I’ll be thinking about that dish for a while. We also ordered some local apple cider, and the bottles they brought us were huge! I thought I might not be able to finish it, but turns out that wasn’t a problem at all. It was delicious and went down easy.

After filling our bellies, we walked over to a spot nearby the Trummelbach Falls and checked out the waterfall there. We had the option of climbing up a big hill to get closer to the water, but our legs were tired from all the hills and steps we’ve been doing the last few days so we passed on that, and enjoyed the view from afar!

On the walk back to the train station to get back to Interlaken and our hostel, we stopped for some mini-donuts! They totally hit the spot for a nice dessert.

We’re off to our next destination in the morning! Let’s hope the trains are a better experience this time… fingers crossed! More later…