Trummelbach Falls

Yesterday was the free afternoon of the conference. Christina and I decided to skip the excursion. I didn't see the point of going halfway to the highest train station in Europe, getting out for an hour, then heading back down. If we were going to do a trip like that, we'd go all the way to the top. It's a good thing we didn't -- aside from the price, the clouds took away the view yesterday (as see on the Jungfraujoch channel on our TV).

Instead, we headed to Trummelbach Falls, a short bus-and-train ride away. (OK, and a 5-minute walk.) The falls, according to the brochure, are the only mountain-interior, accessible waterfalls in Europe. They're also really, really, neat. I don't think our pictures will do them justice.



There weren't a lot of signs (an interesting change from most tourist attractions), but I did learn that most of the water from the Jungfrau mountains, and the nearby Monch and Eiger, drain through the falls. Given the spring snow melt, that's a fair bit of water. Lord Byron was inspired to write some poetry by the falls.

I'm sure Christina will give more detail when she posts. That might not be until we get back.

In any case, the Jungfrau region is a World Heritage Site. This marks my 21st World Heritage Site visited. Only 733 to go!

Lufthansa

Since I know that Christina will soon be posting to her newly created travel blog (I'll link to it when it goes live), I'll save the details of the trip for her to report. Instead I'll concentrate on the minutitae of travel that consume me...like what airline we ended up on.

For some reason, I could only get Christina a free ticket to Switzerland on Lufthansa. I am restricted to booking American (the nationality, not the brand) airlines, but I was able to book the flight on the way over as a United codeshare. By the warped logic this sort of thing goes by, that counts. On the way back, they routed her via Boston, a feat I was unable to duplicate. So she'll be on her own once we get to Frankfurt.

Though I had flown Lufthansa on intra-European flights before, I had never flow it across the pond. All in all, it was fairly nice. The check-in agent took our old seat assignments (in separate rows of the plane) and gave us some crew rest seats I guess they decided they didn't need. They were standard economy seats (i.e., not very comfortable), but they were window and aisle in a 2-4-2 combination. All in all, very survivable.

The Lufthansa "Senator's Club" in Frankfurt was a nice place to relax, although there was more smoking than you'd get in an American facility. They had a room with lounge chairs, which was a nice way of relaxing after the plane. Our flight to Zurich was fairly empty, and I slept through it.