Waiting on the weather finally paid off! We had plans to go to at least two mountaintops during our time in Lauterbrunnen, but the forecast has been cloudy at higher elevations for our first three days here. Today the weather finally cooperated with sunny skies pretty much everywhere in the region so we took the opportunity to go up to Jungfraujoch.
But the story actually starts last night when I was trying to purchase the tickets. Our travel passes don’t cover this, though they do get us a discount. I was trying to buy the necessary tickets, and the first credit card I used wanted to send me a text for verification. Ok, I’ve received texts while in Switzerland already, this shouldn’t be a big deal. Except the text never arrived. So I tried a second time with the same result before switching to another card, only to have it declined due to fraud protection. After about 40 minutes and a conversation with two different people at Chase and Visa, I was I finally able to get the purchase to go through. Luckily that meant I had nothing to worry about this morning.
So what is Jungfraujoch? It’s the highest train station in Europe at 3,454 meters (about 11,332 feet). It sits on a saddle between the Mönch and Jungfrau summits. It took us two trains to get there, with the second one traveling mostly through a tunnel in the side of the mountain. Once you get up there, it’s a really over the top experience designed to get tourists to spend more money (as if the tickets weren’t already enough), but it’s also a really awesome experience, too.
We started by going outside on the platform at the observatory. It was pretty chilly up there, but nothing we haven’t experienced at home. Lots of people were milling around taking ridiculous photographs, and we might have been two of them. Next we went back inside to find our highest elevation cache ever. (Every Switzerland cache up to this point had probably broken our previous record from somewhere in Nebraska, but this crushed it.) Next we walked through the ice palace. We originally thought this was all man made, but the further we went the more it looked like the space had actually been carved out of the glacier. Our last cold attraction was the chance to walk up a rather slippery slope to the plateau area which is visible via the weather webcam.
We had a few more things to take care of before catching a train back down. First was a quick cafeteria style lunch (nothing special). Then we intentionally allowed ourselves to be sucked into the tourist trap that is Lindt Chocolate Heaven. I’m not telling how many truffles we bought…
With our chocolate desires taken care of (again), it was time to catch the next train out of there. The altitude wasn’t making either of us too uncomfortable, but we did feel a little off. The halfway point of a our journey back to Lauterbrunnen was the Kleine Scheidegg Station. We stopped here for a little extra time in order to complete the Grand Tour cache highlighting Jungfraujoch. It turned out to be further away than we were expecting, so we got a nice little walk in. I think this is when we both got a light sunburn. We decided to take a different route back from there, so we stopped in Grindelwald to explore a bit. This was mostly uneventful, but we’ll be back tomorrow for some more adventurous stuff.
