Zurich: Day 4... Day trip to Meiringen and Lucerne

  Well... today was field trip day :)  We got out early and got to the train station and bought tickets to Meiringen via Lucerne. 

Here are the girls with their train station breakfast waiting on our train at the Zurich HB station. We leave Zurich and the train hugs the lake and we start seeing more snowy mountains... every turn gets prettier and prettier. I will say, I usually have to make the kids stop staring at phones and look around, well, I didn't have to do that much today. The two words for today were "look" and "wow". And they were apropos.

 So I will spare you the roughly 8,000 pictures Abigail and I took. But here are just three snaps of many that look roughly all the same. Hey look... a rocky snow capped alpine mountain, with a bucolic little valley, with beautiful wooden alpine houses, usually an old pretty church spier, and typically beside a lake so clear you could see the bottom. OK, I'm going to just say it... they won.

   Nice train ride and we stop in Meiringen. Why you ask? Madison's quest to see Reichenbach Falls... where Sherlock Holmes fakes his death.

 Here's the kids with the man himself. We wander around and find the entrance to the trail up the falls. And so begins a nice three hour hike (up and back) along the sheer mountain face with the falls.

  Here's one of the many (I mean *many*) overlooks where we took pictures. So it's me taking a picture of the girls taking a selfie. I think I may do more of this. It turned out nice plus I don't have to wait on them. You can see the town we climbed out of below. 

  The trail had a few paths up. We took the 'moderate' one. Ha... moderate if you live in Switzerland and climb mountains. One section that branched off was closed, but Madison and I took it and got as far as we could before joining back up with the others to continue up.

 You can see the cable you hold on to beside the sheer cliff... I'm guessing about 600 feet up as the total falls is 820 feet. This was _not_ my favorite part. Kind of like the Eiffel Tower but with no railing... how cool.

   We made it to the top of the falls and the end of the road. The rest period included snow angels, an actual snow man, and some snow ball eating.

I wish the panoramic did it better justice. Here I walked up and looked down on the girls building the snowman. It was just phenomenal.

Oh yeah... what we came fore :) Here's Madison at the top of the falls.

 And from the bottom once we made it back down.
  We ate a nice lunch and made our way to the train station for a ride back to Lucerne.

Lucerne was pretty, and I'm glad we stopped to check it out, but I think Zurich was the right place to stay as a home base.
  Pretty early night, but everyone is tired. Probably some Netflix and much needed rest. Tomorrow should be a low key day as we just try to finish a few things up before leaving.

Jim