Budget Buster

My God, Switzerland is expensive!!

You always hear that that is the case, but I had no idea just how true it was until recently.

It is, of course, beautiful, and spotlessly clean. Everywhere. Even public toilets in train stations, tourist attractions, are spotless. The streets are clean, there is no paper anywhere, no garbage out of place, no dog poop even. I think that Swiss dogs have figured out how to produce poop that evaporates the moment it hits the ground.

But all this cleanliness and beauty comes with a price: the public toilets at the train station cost 1.50 Francs; parking at the train station in Bern cost 28.00 francs for a few hours!!! An average main course at a restaurant costs around 30.00 francs, and that's at the cheap places.

The train and cable car system in and around Grindelwald is 50 francs each way, for a ride that might only take 30 minutes! To go up to the Jungfraujoch, which is called Top of Europe, costs 163.00 Francs per person! That's just for the train ride to get up there! If you want to drink a small bottle of mineral water while you're there, it will cost 5.50 francs. For a teeny bottle.

As I mentioned, expensive.

But all that aside, it is a beautiful place. On our way here to Grindelwald, we stopped in the beautiful city of Bern (this photo and the one above). This place was like a postcard, with shops and cafes all along the cobbled streets, a terrific clock tower, and a beautiful river.

This cafe was my favorite. One guess why.

After that, it was off to Grindelwald, which is a small mountain town near Interlaken. It's one of the few towns in this area where you can drive your car (many of the smaller mountaintop towns are pedestrian only, and you have to park your car down the mountain and take a train or cable car up. We would have loved to stay in one of those towns, but we just have too much stuff.).

We took a pretty incredible train ride up to Jungfraujoch, as I mentioned, which is at the top of a mountain at 3954 meters. The most amazing thing to me, however, was the fact that the first train up to the top of this mountain was built in something like 1905. That's just crazy!

It's a massive complex up there: complete with ice palace and ice carvings, multiple viewing stations, restaurants, one of which is Bollywood, an Indian Buffet, and snow-play area with innertubes.

It was incredible to go from the heat wave to snow and wind and temperatures of about 35 degrees.