Last weekend, it looked like the sun might actually come out for a little bit, so Paul and I schemed up a hike at work on Friday afternoon. On Saturday morning, the Ericksons and I met at the train station to head out to
Appenzell, which is a region in the eastern part of Switzerland. This area of Switzerland is actually quite close by train to Zürich, but none of us had ever been there. A lot of the higher mountains areas are not accessible right now because they're either under snow or the lifts to access them aren't running during the between–season (as they call it). Also, in Appenzell, 8 hours of sunshine were promised for Saturday! So we were quite excited to see what this area was like.
Although I have to admit I was a little nervous, given that Appenzell has a reputation for being a great place to hike in the nude. Luckily, we saw no nude hikers. Unluckily, we pretty much saw nothing at all. The 8 hours of sunshine never materialized, and we ended up hiking entirely in a very dense fog that made everything look rather bizarre and mysterious. It was actually kind of cool and beautiful in its own way, but a little disappointing not to see the sun.
One funny part about the hike was that it was a joke hike, so every 10 meters (or so it seemed) there was a placard with a joke (there were 80 jokes in total!). Unfortunately, the jokes were all written in Swiss German, so the most we could understand was that a joke was about a doctor and water, or something else about that level. We thought it was a very interesting idea for a hike theme, though.
 |
| What is this? |
 |
| The Erickson family. |
 |
| The fog was pretty thick. |
 |
| Lunchtime! |
 |
| Weitblick means literally "far view". Not so much... |
 |
| Walking through the foggy forest. |
 |
| Weird playground with a beer cask and pitcher for hard apple cider. |
 |
| Apparently this place has something to do with burning witches at the stake. Not creepy at all... |
 |
| Sheepies! |
 |
| A happy hiker! |
It was really fun to hike with Paul and Jessica and Jakob, and overall we had a nice day, in spite of the weather. Then, on the train ride home, we came out of the fog and saw the sunset, so we did get to see the sun, at least! Hopefully the next time hiking in Appenzell we will have better luck with the weather!
