The Adventuring Hills

Last time I wrote I left it with us strolling through Zermatt and heading towards the mountains. To be exact. we had arranged to go on the Matterhorn Glacier Paradise excursion, using our half-fare rail cards. This trip involved taking 4 gondolas up the mountains and once at the top you had a panoramic view of 38 peaks of the Alps. It was set to be a beautiful day, little did I know at the time that it was going to get extra special. So we headed on up the mountain, working our way through the various gondolas. You can get off at each stage and go exploring if you wish, but we decided we wanted to go all the way up first and explore on our way down if we wanted to. Arriving at the top, it's safe to say the view was spectacular! We made our way up in the lift to the viewing platform that sets you at 3883m, and able to see the French, Italian and Swiss Alps. In the distance is Mont Blanc (the highest mountain in Europe and somewhere that we had driven through on our very first ro...

Having come back down the mountain from being at the top of Europe, we headed back to the car to hit the road for our next stop. We had booked ourselves in for a couple of days in a place called Zermatt. When we first looked at this placed, I thought that there was no way Paul was going to want to stay here - they have a complete ban on any fuel burning vehicle. They only have electric powered vehicles. Surprisingly though, we did decide to go - it's kind of a modern age dream to experience no cars allowed in this current society. What to do with the car whilst we stayed here though? And how do you then get into Zermatt? Well thankfully this was easily answered - there is a town just before Zermatt called Täsch, which has a big train station with trains going straight into Zermatt, and plenty of parking. We found the parking costs at the train station very reasonable, I think it was about 30-40CHF for what was just over 2 days. There are other options available as well - a lot of...

Having spent the night on top of the world, we had planned to go even higher up and head to the top of Europe - Jungfraujoch! It's also known as the highest train station in Europe sitting at a pretty cool 3454m above sea level. We knew we had plenty of time for this section of the adventure, as our next stop was only about a 2 hour drive away (a short distance in comparison to some of the drives we had done so far) so once we got back down from our hotel, we had a short walk across to the train station to get the train on up. We had pre-booked this trip through Swiss Travel Centre, as we had also bought a Half Fare Railcard each - at £89 each, they're not cheap, but the savings you get from these railcards quickly adds up as they do what they say on the tin and give you 50% discount on the trains, boats, buses and some cable cars. For the 2 excursions we knew we had planned, we had effectively made our money back on the ticket costs, and then there were added bonuses like ou...