Ayumi and Dave went to Switzerland

Last week, Ayumi and I went to Switzerland with Ayumi's parents. The trip was a 60th birthday present for Ayumi's parents and Ayumi and her brother and sister paid for the airline tickets.

We visited four different places in Switzerland: Zermatt, Grindewald, Interlaken and Bern. Zermatt and Grindewald are mountain resort villages. Interlaken is between two beautiful lakes and Bern is the capital of Switzerland, but it is not a big city.

Zermatt is famous for it's views of the Matterhorn, one of the most famous mountains in the world.

In summer, many hikers go there and in winter, it is popular for skiing. We went hiking and rode some cable cars up to about 3800 meters.

Next, we went to Grindewald, which is also a mountain town with many small hotels. Our hotel was run by the same family for more than 100 years.

In Grindewald, we rode on a zip line, hiked down a mountain and rode on Trottibikes, which are a kind of scooter with big tires. The zip line and trottibike videos are below.

Also, from Grindewald, we took a train to the highest train station in Europe, close to the top of Jungfrau mountain. The air was very thin at the top of the mountain, but the view was spectacular. We could see mountains across the border in Italy.

We took a 2 hour hike at the top, it was on the snow, but it wasn't too cold because it was very sunny. Actually, I got a bad sunburn even though I had sunblock on my face.

Inside the building at the top of the mountain was a gift shop and a place to mail postcards. There was a Swiss postbox and a Japanese postbox. I used the Japanese postbox. I think there was a Japanese postbox because many many Japanese tourists visit there. In fact, almost everywhere we went, we saw large groups of Japanese tourists. I was a bit surprised.

The next day we traveled to Interlaken and Ayumi's father and I went hang gliding. I don't like heights and I thought it would be very scary, but it was a lot of fun and not scary at all. My pilot was a Swiss/Australian man named Bernie and he was a very good pilot.

In the afternoon we took a boat ride around one of the lakes, the water was a bright blue, but not very clear. The next day we went to Bern to see Swiss city life. There were a lot of old buildings and we went an old cathedral with beautiful stained-glass windows.

Our final day, we went to an old swiss village where traditional craftsmen work and we could see a lot of old Swiss buildings. We saw people making cheese, carving wood and spinning yarn. We also saw some musical performances.

We had a great trip! If you want to see all of our pictures, please click here.