This will probably be a blog with more pictures than words. After 3 full days in Paris, one in a car, and then another in the city of Bern, it was time to get away from people for a bit. So that’s exactly what we did. We woke up and took off for Beatenberg which is home to Mt. Niederhorn. This was about an hour away by car, but the drive was towards the Bernese Alps for the entire time, which you can see by the pictures was distracting.

We drove a little ways up the mountain (Beatenberg) where we were planning on taking the gondola to the top, hiking along the ridge, and then coming down which would be about a 4 ½ hour hike. However, the gondola man informed us there was 40 centimeters of snow up there and apparently he thought that was pertinent information after looking at our running shoes. So instead we took the lift up to Nederhorn and walked around the top for a bit. The weather was absolutely perfect at the top and at the bottom. I would guess it was hovering around 70 degrees at the bottom and still about 60 at the top. The snow was decently packed down on the path we would have taken but we decided against giving it a go. We instead had a coffee at the restaurant up top and made our way down to the mid-point (Vorsass) and hiked the rest of the way to the bottom (Beatenberg), which took around an hour and a half. I think we said this several times in the New Zealand blog, but once again the pictures just didn’t do it justice but we will give it a shot.

Following the mountain hike we drove to the town of Interlaken (bottom right on map). This was an awesome little town that if I had to guess is home to quite a few vacation homes for Bern residents. The views were perfect and the beer house they had served over 200 beers on tap so it was a win all around.

Also, Caitlin won't stop going into souvenir shops looking for Mika things. Unfortunately we have no live sightings just yet.