Since we left Portland on Tuesday, August 12th we’ve spent a morning in Zurich walking through the city’s old town, hiked in the Alps, and visited a castle on the lake. One of the major sights in Zurich’s old town was the 8th century church of St. Peter’s which boasts Europe’s largest clock face. On the afternoon of the 14th we drove to the small alpine town of Sigriswil, our base for a day of hiking and sightseeing. We had a few false starts on Friday, August 15th. We had planned to hike the popular North Face Trail from Murren, but our GPS directions led us to a road closed to thru traffic and we were unable to access the trailhead from that direction. Luckily, the end of the road for us turned out to be a Unesco Heritage site with a number of trail options. We opted for a 5-mile loop trail which guaranteed stunning mountain and waterfall views. Again, another false start. A little over a mile into the hike (all uphill at this point), we met a group of hikers coming back down who said the trail was overgrown a little further on and basically impassable. So, what we hoped would be a 5 mile hike ended up being @ 2.5 miles. The sunny side to this story is that it gave us time in the afternoon to visit the Oberhofen Castle and to walk across the Panoramabrucke Sigriswil suspension bridge with views of the Bernese Alps and Lake Thun. Today was spent driving to Turin, Italy where we dropped off the car and then took a bus to Aosta, Italy where we’ll start our Via Francigena walk in the morning.
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| St. Peter's clock face |
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| View of our Alpine hike |
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| Another view from the hike |
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| Oberhofen Castle |
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