“Rainy Day” Turned Fabulous

We had seen the weather forecast for Friday June 30 in Mürren remain terrible since a week ago: rain all day long, 25 mm. Sure enough it was sprinkling a little in the morning as we ate breakfast. Then it stopped, so we decided to do a hike where we could bail back to town when it got really wet. The route right above town started steeply – it was a bike route but I would hate to try and ride this. There were flowers out everywhere and the view across the valley kept changing and generally getting better. There were lots of happy Swiss cows with bells.

After an hour we had climbed 300m to Allmendhubel. There was the most amazing flower themed playground there, plus a carefully laid out “Alpine Flowers Interpretive Trail”. We played around on the swings, the labyrinth, narrow underground pipe tunnels, and a zip line. The labyrinth has a button you press – it starts a timer and water jets – then you run through avoiding the water jets to hit the other button to stop the timer. Why doesn’t the US have playgrounds like this?

The rain still was holding off so we headed down the backside in order to make a loop back. Due to the weather it was so uncrowded with only one family with kids at the playground and very few people on the trails. The flowers were just amazing, everywhere, so many types and so beautiful.

Eventually we were back down in Mürren. We thought a nice place for lunch would be at the start of the famous Via Ferrata so we started down it and the sun came out! It was warm and we saw another couple decked out with climbing gear starting out. So a new plan was made: back up to town to rent harnesses asap! We got to the store but it was a sad story: much too dangerous to rent gear on a day like this – you could be fried by lightening strikes. And it takes 3 hours, blah blah blah, no luck.

So we had a picnic in town, then picked out another loop trail, this time down to Gimmelwald, about 300m lower, also a carless town. The rain still held off as we cruised down the steep mountain trail and came out in the little village where Nathan stayed 11 years ago. We each had a beer in the beer garden, delicious IPA.

But as we finished, the rain did finally start. So back up to Mürren, walking the main route Nathan had done with Geoff before. There were lots of slugs and snails out here and with our umbrellas we didn’t get super wet.

We were back at the hotel and it was just after 3pm so we hung out, watched the original Heidi movie from 1937 (highly recommended). You can watch the original black & white high res version here. We wrote in the blog and then some hours later went out for a nice dinner close by. Nathan had raclette, the classic Swiss cheese/potato/pickle/onion dish. We considered the whole day a success – the hike was certainly a bonus since it was supposed to rain hard all day.