Lauterbrunnen and Wengen 🇨🇭🏔️

June 18, 2025

Today was another stellar day enjoying Mother Nature’s eye candy here in Switzerland. We left our hotel in Lucerne early to head to the train station to get some more use of our Swiss Rail Pass. The days objective was Wengen, an Alpine village accessible only by rail. We needed three trains to get there but that proved not to be a problem. We learned on the first leg of our journey that you don’t necessarily have to book a ticket on one of Switzerland’s scenic rail routes to experience amazing scenery. The lakes between Lucerne and Interlaken were of a colour that defies description, so we’ve attached pictures. In Interlaken, we boarded a train and had to be careful which end of the train we sat on. Part way through its journey, at a place called Zweilutschinen (which cannot be used in a game of Scrabble because it is capitalized), this train split itself in two….one half going to Grindewald and the other to Lauterbrunnen. We managed not to screw this up and got ourselves onto the Lauterbrunnen half of the train, and we easily made our connection there to our final train to Wengen within the four minute window that was allotted.

Once on board in Lauterbrunnen, we phoned ahead to our hotel to arrange a shuttle pickup upon arrival. This is a very welcome service when your hotel is on an Alp.

Although we arrived long before checkin time, our room was ready so we were able to drop our bags and then jump back on the train and return to Lauterbrunnen for the afternoon. The Lauterbrunnen valley is the home of an outrageous number of waterfalls, the most famous and closest of which is Staubbach Falls. There is a trail which leads to a place that is nearly behind the falls, and the fact that there are goats along the route should give you an indication as to what sort of path it is. We coaxed ourselves to the very end of the trail before returning to town to reward ourselves with a beer. It was an unfamiliar beer but I think it had eleven syllables. We earned it.

After the afternoon in Lauterbrunnen, we once again hopped the train to make the climb back to Wengen. We had made a reservation at the hotel for a cheese fondue dinner on their patio. If you had suggested to me before his trip that I would be dining in short sleeves at 8:00 in the evening in the Alps, I would have said you were nuts. Nonetheless, that’s exactly what happened. The amazing weather we’ve been blessed with has followed us to Wengen. Today was not as hot as Como was, but it was hot enough that, on the train ride in, we saw bikini clad women on chaise lounges working on their tans.

Anyway, the cheese fondue was a first for both of us, and we really enjoyed it. It didn’t hurt that our backdrop was the famous Alp peak, Jungfrau, which kept peeking at us from behind the evening clouds. We keep having to pinch ourselves because of the incredible experiences and sights that this holiday has brought our way.