Mountainous

Happy New Year to all!  I hope each and every one of you had a wonderful holiday season.  We sure did.  It was one heck of a trip, and it felt like we were gone for a long time, which is always a good thing when you're on vacation.   As you could probably guess, I'll cover part of the trip in this post and the rest later.  There's a lot to fill you in on!

Let me start at the beginning, in Innsbruck, Austria.  We arrived on December 23 to a city full of Christmas cheer.  Innsbruck lies in a valley of the Tyrolean Alps, so the setting was perfect with Christmas markets and adorable architecture surrounded by beautiful mountains.  Here are some photos of the city at night.

We spent our time taking it pretty easy in Innsbruck.  The highlights were definitely the food and our trip in a cable car up the mountains.  We took the Nordkettenbahn cable car to the top of the Nordkette mountain on Christmas Eve for some amazing views of the other mountains and the city lying in the valley below.

Hot chocolate from the cafe at the top.

Todd went nuts with the panoramas. 

The cable car that took us up and down.

View out of the window.

It felt great to be up the mountain air and taking in an incredible view.  We also kept busy on Christmas Eve by exploring the city, checking out a palace and some churches, and attending an English speaking church service at a beautiful church in town.  We also ate two meals at Italian restaurants since they were the only places we could find that were open. Nothing says Christmas like pizza.  Here's a few more shots of the city:

View from our hotel room every morning.

Goldenes Dachl, the Golden Roof.

On Christmas Day, we tried our best to go cross country skiing in the surrounding area, but it turns out there just wasn't enough snow. In fact, there was barely any snow even on the tops of the mountains and the weather was very mild our whole time there.  So instead of skiing through the woods/mountains, we took a hike.  We ventured to the neighboring town of Seefeld, which was also very cute, and we set out on the trails.

The trail map reading wasn't the easiest. I blame the map. 

The best part of the hike was coming across this restaurant in the woods, where we had one of the best meals of the trip.

We even got to sit outside to eat with the sun shining, pretty nice for December 25!

Todd's dumplings.

My spatzle with cheese and onions.

After hiking into town, we took the train back to Innsbruck where we finished the day with another really great meal.  It consisted of traditional Austrian cuisine and the building used to be a castle - perfect for our Christmas dinner.

Next up on the agenda was heading over to Switzerland to the Bernese Oberland.  Both Bernese Mountain dogs and St. Bernards came from this region, so it must be awesome.  Our hub for our time was spent in Interlaken, which is located in the valley and serves as a great jumping off point for getting up into the mountains.  Again, the weather was pretty mild, but luckily the mountains here were at a high enough elevation to get their fair share of snow.

We traveled by train from Austria to Switzerland, and ended up stopping in Zurich for lunch on our way.  Unfortunately it was raining and it was the second day of Christmas (that's a thing here), so everything we saw was closed!  The only restaurant we could find open was a burger joint where we were greeted by Swiss prices. Hello, $30 burger!  But here's a couple of photos of Zurich we snapped:

We settled into Interlaken that night, grabbing a meal at a trendy and totally not traditional spot, which was welcome after a few days of only lace clad restaurants.

Our next day is definitely a contender for best day of the trip.  We went on a snowshoeing and sledding excursion up in the mountains.  We had a guide and were with two other Swiss people, and it was incredible.  Although the trip up into the mountains was a bit harrowing in a 15-passenger van on ice-covered roads, the whole experience was great.  I think I'll let the photos do most of the speaking for themselves.

The snow was fresh from the day before, so were blazing our own trail snowshoeing through the Swiss Alps. It was pretty epic. And we had amazing views of the 3 highest peaks in the area, the Eiger, Monch, and Jungfrau.

Awesome view down into the valley. 

After trekking in an upwardly direction, we needed to come down the mountain to get to our lunch spot.  Going down was pretty fun.  Todd did lose his snowshoes twice while heading down, but he was the fastest.

But the fun didn't stop there, after removing our snowshoes, we ate a fondue lunch at a little chalet on the mountainside.

This stuff was sooo good.

After filling ourselves with loads of cheese, bread, and potatoes, we grabbed our sleds to head further down the mountain.

Weeeeeeeeeeee!

Frozen waterfall.

One last view of the 3 giants.

What a day!  One we will certainly never forget.  We capped it off with a meal of rosti (kind of like hashbrowns) and chicken cordon bleu.

The next day, we headed out to Lake Thun.  Interlaken means "between the lakes", so we figured we better see the water.  It did not disappoint!

Skipping rocks.

We did some walking around the lake and then grabbed a hot chocolate at a cafe there where we further enjoyed the view.

Later that day we hopped on a train for Basel, since we'd be flying out of there early the next morning for Istanbul.  Our hotel and the airport were actually located in France (and we literally walked over the Swiss/French border to get there), so I guess our trip consisted of a 4 country visit instead of 3.  And that's where I'll end for today.  We spent 5 days in Istanbul, so I'll be back with that massive recap later!