Tues, May 28 - Back to Basel (w/pictures)

We woke to another sunny day with almost no wind.  We were glad to see that since we had to take the chairlift back down and storms had been predicted to move into the area.  We had a nice breakfast, gathered up our things, and headed back down the mountain.

This was not our way down. :-)

I'm not sure if it is still used, but this is a delivery cart which runs down to the bottom of the mountain.  Instead of this, we saw them bringing up supplies by putting boxes on the chair lift.

Heading down

Engleberg

We had some time to walk around the city of Engelberg before catching our train and walked around a monastery along the way.  The church there has the largest pipe organ in Switzerland and, not surprisingly the church itself was impressive also. 

On the way to the station we passed a hotel whose name caught my eye.  It was so odd to see it I had to think twice about if it really was spelled the same.

We were sorry to leave the snow capped Alps behind but were glad to have had the chance to experience them so up close!

We arrived back in Basel early enough that I knew no one would be home yet so we walked the couple of miles back from the train station.  The weather was still nice and in fact Jenny and I had to stop several times to peal off the layers we had put on up in the mountains.  My sister’s home has a small yard in back and we settled in to wait for someone to get home.  We found that the weather can change here as fast as it does back in Nebraska.  In about 15 minutes it went from warm and sunny to cold, windy, cloudy, with thunder in the distance.  A neighbor noticed us out there and invited us in to wait.  They spoke English very well (way better than my almost non-existent German) and we enjoyed the visit.

That catches me up on the text portion of the blog.  I’ll have to see later tonight how many pictures I can manage to insert.  That process always takes more effort than I think it should.

Tomorrow we head out bright and early for Ireland.  We don’t arrive there until dinner time so it will mainly be a day of travel – but we will be spending the night in Ireland.