On Top of the World: My weekend in the Alps

[2:30pm, Homestay Apartment]

This past weekend was amazing: incredibly cold, incredibly expensive, but amazing. And I wouldn’t change a thing. The pictures below will speak for themselves, but here’s a recap:

Sixteen or so friends and I flew Thursday night from Madrid to Geneva, where we caught a 2.5-hour bus to Interlaken, arriving at Balmer’s Herberge hostel (Switzerland’s oldest and one of the top ten in Europe) at 2am.  Though I shared a room with 7 other people, the beds were actually quite comfortable and Balmer’s offers free breakfast and chocolate snacks, its own popular nightclub, and an outdoor hot tub.   

Day 1: Skiing in the Alps

Friday morning we woke up early, hopped on a mountain train, and spent all day skiing at 7,500ft in the Swiss Alps.  Since I think the last time (and the only place) I had gone skiing was in sixth grade at Hidden Valley in St. Louis, where the biggest vertical drop is 310ft, I had my fair share of (controlled) wipeouts from time to time.  But eventually I got into a groove, and by the end of the day I was making my way down the slopes like the mountain man I was born to be.

Day 2: Skydiving, Hot Tub, Lakes and Family Dinner

The next morning, we got up early again and headed to see one of Interlaken’s beautiful lakes (see pictures below).  We got back to the hostel just in time to be picked up by our skydiving instructors, driven to the drop zone, suited up, and within an hour I was in a tiny plane flying above the mountains at 13,000ft.  Five minutes after takeoff, without having time to think about how freaky it was to jump out of a plane, the buzzer sounded, the side door went up, and I was hanging out with the instructor snug on my back and nowhere to go but down.  The initial drop is the coolest feeling in the world: first free-falling, rolling head over heels, then leveling out, spreading my arms, doing a few fist-pumps, and dropping for 45 seconds; then pulling the shoot and gliding down alongside the snow-covered mountains to our snow-covered landing zone below; and within nearly 12 minutes since pulling myself up into the plane before takeoff, I had landed safety on the ground, ears hurting, but ecstatic.  The whole thing was unreal.

Later that day I visited the other Interlaken lake, which was beautiful, but with the temperatures approaching negative and the winds howling, it was the coldest I had ever felt.  Within two minutes of arriving at the bus stop, we were running into the nearest restaurant trying to recover feeling in our hands and feet.  Luckily, back at the hostel we had the hot tub to plunge into!  But unfortunately, it was more of the YMCA, lukewarm hot tubs.  Add that to the icicles forming on our heads, the decision to run wet and freezing back into the hostel sounded more pleasant after a while than crossing our arms and near-shivering underneath the water.  But being in a hot tub at night outside in the Alps was unbelievable.

That night we enjoyed a big Italian dinner with all our friends at the hostel (Thanks to Amanda and the crew) before heading downstairs to the nightclub and getting our dance on.

Day 3:  Downtown Interlaken, Superbowl in Geneva, and Sleeping in the Airport

Day 3 we woke up and strolled around Downtown Interlaken before hopping on the bus back to Geneva.  With record cold in other parts of Europe, Geneva too was absolutely freezing.  Add that to the fact that everyone we met there said the city “basically sucks” (and it’s incredibly expensive), we decided to drop our bags at a hostel, walk to Mr. Pickwick’s (“the oldest English pub in Switzerland”), and spend the next seven hours in our own private room, going in and out of sleep while trying to catch parts of the Superbowl.  At 4:30am we hopped on a metro bus to the airport, where we learned that our 6:45am flight had been delayed until 12:30pm. So we slept some more in the airport: all 20 or so of us passed out at the Starbucks and then on the floor near our gate.  The whole time in Geneva was basically a big, worn-out daze; with 32 hours between sleeping in a bed, it felt good to get back to my home in Madrid.   

Some Fun Facts:

-Total Expenses: €785

-Types of transport: 2 Madrid metro trains, 2 easyJet planes, 2 coach buses, 4 Swiss mountain trains, 4 chairlifts, 2 vans, 9 Swiss metro buses, 1 Swiss train, and 1 Geneva tram.

-We went skydiving at -11 °F; -13°F is the legal limit.

-Places I slept: Balmer’s hostel, 2 mountain trains, 2 coach buses, Mr. Pickwicks bar, Starbucks and on the floor at the Geneva Airport, and 1 easyJet plane. 

-I’m sad I didn’t get a Swiss stamp on my passport.

Coming up: Tonight I leave for a 4 day trip to Morocco. From the Alps, to Madrid, to Africa in three days: pretty unbelievable.  

Remember to send me an email if you would like to receive updates on new posts at charliemegaman@yahoo.com.  And feel free to comment below.  

We're doin it big,

Chuck Diesel