it finally started snowing. well, already two days ago. but today, for the first time, it was sunny again! (and we started moving the snow away from the balcony and the pathways so the cats won’t take a dump there…)
this is how it looks like from out of a cat tree:
once during the last days of december, a great fog panorama presented itself to us. the fog was close, but didn’t reach us yet:
after more than two years, we returned to the beautiful val bregaglia for vacation. again, we were staying in hotel helvetia in vicosoprano on the swiss side of the valley.
we stayed during the first of the two “chestnut weeks”, dedicated to edible chestnuts which are growing all over the valley. except on the day we arrived on and the first half day, the weather was really good!
we visited sils and chiavenna:
we again visited the chestnut forest in castasegna:
and we walked another part of the via panoramica, this time from soglio, and then descending to stampa:
also, again, we enjoyed some great culinary specialities. in particular, we enjoyed several meals (again) at hotel corona, where we also had the opportunity to meet the goats producing the milk for the wonderful goat cheese, which is part of our favorite tomato goat cheese salad. also the different pasta and meat dishes we had were fantastic. yeah well. if it wouldn’t be so far from here (5-6 hours by public transport, depending on how often you want to change trains), i’d guess we’d go there more often ;-)
this year we visitsed the german nordseeküste (north sea coast). on our first day, we were greeted by a kite convention held in schillig and a heavy storm. the kites were taken in before the storm blasted off, and on the next day we could admire them again.
one nice thing about the coast is that it isn’t that hot there. it’s usually a few degrees less than more inland, and there’s more wind, making the hot temperatures this summer way more bearable.
we visited norderney, did a mudflat hike from the coast to baltrum (walking on the ocean ground – how cool is that?), enjoying the wattenmeer in general, and also visited the harbor seal breeding station in norddeich. and, of course, just enjoyed the scenery, like walking at the beach during day and night.
definitely a place where we will return to!
some weeks ago, we visited the stanserhorn, taking up the “cabrio” cable car. up there, the weather was quite bearable compared to in zürich, where it was way above 30 degrees, though it was not as nice – it even rained a little. later, we took the ship form hergiswil back to lucerne.
we spent part of this weekend in zermatt.
on friday, we took the cable cars up to the top of the klein matterhorn, up to 3880 meters above sea level. it’s an amazing trip! unfortunately, we weren’t very lucky with the weather, and from a certain high on we were essentially covered in clouds. there also was kind of a snowstorm going on, which made it quite unconfortable on the outside:
(we didn’t walk up to the summit; without a ski mask it was not that much fun walking through the essentially horizontally flying snow…)
on the other hand, we walked a bit through illuminated glacier:
here are two photos from the trip down:
at least, it was possible to see something from there, even though we couldn’t see the matterhorn at all. but well, on the second day we got a glimpse. there were still some clouds around (and the klein matterhorn was covered by them a lot of the time), but this time we went up the gornergrat to around 3100 meters above sea level. up there, we had some really great views!
later, when travelling back, instead of taking the direct route via visp and zurich, we decided to follow the glacier express trail a bit by taking the matterhorn-gotthard bahn from visp via göschenen to andermatt, and then proceeded home from there. the last photos above are from that trip.
on sunday, we had a quite long and pretty intense thunderstorm. flashes firing off every few seconds, and finally, when it reached us, a constant rumble of thunder. while it didn’t got here, i tried to take some pictures – which is quite non-trivial, since flashes and pressing the trigger in precisely the right moment in advance don’t correlate very well. out of the few hundred shots, some were quite beautiful. below you can find three of them, with contrast intensified a bit.
