Day 4 and 5: Travel and Feelin' the Bern

Preface: This was the first time I posted the pictures, as you can probably tell because of the captions.

I am going to combine two days into one for this post. We are doing this because yesterday was pretty uneventful as it was primarily just a driving day from Paris to Bern, Switzerland. We woke up yesterday to a rainy Paris which is great because the only day it decided to rain was the one when we would be stuck in a car. Getting the car went surprisingly smooth and getting out of Paris, while a bit stressful (mainly for me as the passenger) was also not as bad as we had thought it would be. Once outside of Paris it was a normal drive in the sense that the steering wheel was on the same side as the Mazda back home and we drove on the same side of the street as everyone back home—both of which were not the case in New Zealand. To make everything seem great and wonderful when maybe it wasn’t is not truthful and hopefully if we are honest it can help future travelers, so I will be honest when I describe the whole drive (5 hours) while still in France. It wasn’t cool. There were only a couple of towns that were visible from the road and it was just flat otherwise. However, the second we crossed into Switzerland is when we could start to see the mountains on the horizon. It was also oddly easy to enter in Switzerland. There were no real signs and then we came up to the border and stopped where it said to stop but no one came out and other cars were passing us so we just decided to keep driving. Hopefully that doesn’t cause us issues coming back into the France in a few days.

We drove around Bern to get to our Airbnb so didn’t get a good glimpse of the city immediately. About 10 minutes outside of Bern is a small suburb and we went to the address where our “House in a Cave” awaited our arrival around 8:00 PM. The listing didn’t lie, the house is literally underneath a sheer cliff, built into a cave. The other thing the listing didn’t lie about (but maybe didn’t stress enough) was the hike up to the cave. There are approximately 350 stairs that lead up to the house and those steps take just about 5 minutes to climb. What keeps us entertained while climbing is talking about all of our friends and family members who would hate climbing the steps. You know who you are. We ended the night with walking back down the stairs, going to a gas station, and getting a nice frozen pizza for dinner because everything was closed up for the evening.

Looking down and out from the AirBnb... that's a prison in the distance. We think that it's filled with a bunch of hard Swiss criminals who have defaced historical sights and shoplifted.

The next morning we set off for Bern despite it being a bit colder and rainy. The town of Bern is unlike anything either one of has ever seen, which makes sense since Bern dates back to the 12th century and the preserved medieval architecture verifies that. For the most part we just wandered for a while until CAITLIN needed nourishment (she gets mad that I could go for days and not mention food and when I am in a groove I don’t want something silly like food to get in the way). Luckily we stumbled upon Albert Einstein café which is located underneath Albert’s apartment he lived in. After some Einstein beers, we felt smarter and were ready to conquer the world. The next stop was the Bern Museum which had a whole floor dedicated to Einstein, but a lot of other stuff pertaining to Switzerland’s fairly uneventful past (that’s not a bad thing). A few Einstein facts:

- He was really into the ladies. He was married a couple of times and that didn’t stop him from seeing many more but unfortunately one of those ladies was his cousin so he can’t be given too much credit.

- He didn’t actually have anything to do with the Manhattan Project.

- He had really sweaty feet. Like so severe that it was actually mentioned as one of the three reasons he couldn’t serve in the war.

We stumbled upon this big clock at 11:57 AM and there were a bunch of tourists looking up at it so naturally we thought it was going to do something really badass at noon... it just rang 12 times.

Following the museum we made our way to the Bärengraben (bear pit). The Bear Pit is a park that they have built right along the river that allows people to watch bears to bear stuff in their ‘natural environment.’ There are 3 (mom, dad, and cub) and they were all out and active which was pretty cool. After the bear watch we had another hungry bear (Caitlin) so we hung out at the restaurant/brewery at the bear park and had some big pretzels. Pretty much everyone and everything in Bern is German, even the food, so we’ve seen a lot of sausages and spätzle. We made one more stop at an excellent Beer Garden, then made our way back to our house in the cave. Tomorrow is supposed to very nice so we are going to try and go hiking around Interlaken.

Bears. These bears were actually what the Berenstain Bears are based off of.... I actually just made that up but sounded great didn't it?

Des Moines is doing some cool stuff but we think they should get a bear pit like this next to the Des Moines River.