The weather really wasn’t lookin great all week, but fortunately the day at Grindelwald ended up being way better than forecasted. That ended up being the case on this day as well, but we still got some rain here and there.
Because we weren’t sure how terrible the weather was going to be, we decided to stick close to our airbnb and explore the city of Thun. Now, as some of you may know, once you see a few quaint European cities, you’ve kind of seen them all, and Thun was no exception to that. However, it was still fun! They have these large locks on either side of the river that help regulate the flow, presumably to avoid flooding everyone. One of the first things we saw was a surfer trying to hit this standing wave on the down flow side of the lock. He did a pretty good job until he didn’t. Here is the Garmin for the stroll around town we did. We got tasty crepes. Oh yeah, and I also found a CD for this Chinese prog band I like, so I bought that.
I’ll let the video below show you the highlights of this day, but my favorite part was swimming with my Mom in Thun Lake on our way home. The water wasn’t exactly warm, but it wasn’t too bad. Here is the Garmin for that swim. Swimming is hard.
I will go ahead and take this white space to explain the benefits of traveling with a Boomer. When I travel around Europe, I try (and fail) at speaking the language. My biggest problem is I can understand things reasonably well when written on paper, and I generally know what to say. However, I’m never ready for people to respond to me. I’ll go up and order something in German, and then they’ll ask me some question. This question immediately becomes a “gotcha”, and my image of being able to speak the language breaks down.
However, when you travel with a Boomer, they will unashamedly go up to anyone and everyone and just speak American at them until somebody responds. It’s kind of embarrassing on one hand, but on the other hand, it gets results. If nobody speaks American, you find the nearest piece of written information and start pointing. Traveling around Switzerland is much easier with a Boomer if you don’t understand the language. I guess what I’m trying to say is, “Thanks, Dad!”.