On an adventure like this, we find ourselves collecting a lot of maps, guidebooks, brochures and other material… stuff that we won’t need any more while in Europe, but is too interesting to pitch entirely.

So today we head to the Post Office. We’d gathered from our packs about five pounds of printed matter, and stuffed it all into a yellow box to put on a slow boat home. That lightened our loads a bit.

Bobber and Elena are preparing to host a Halloween party Wednesday night. That gives us just enough time for a side trip to Switzerland. Early in the afternoon we said some temporary good-byes and jumped on the next south-bound train for Basel, Switzerland.

We plan to do three things in Switzerland:
1) to follow up on reports we’d read on the Swiss’ relaxed attitude toward some popular stress relief medications;
2) to explore the region of the Alps south of Interlaken, which we later learned is known as the Jungfrau region; and
3) to ride a grand loop through southeastern Switzerland, including a train called the Glacier Express.

The Swiss have been into the hospitality business since at least Roman times, and maybe even before, so the whole country feels like one big resort. We’re lucky enough to expect nearly perfect weather while we’re here, and the fall colors are at their peak (though more subdued than they can be in Wisconsin or New England).

We had some early confusion about the exchange rate, which had us kind of freaking out about prices. For whatever reason, we thought there were 1.2 Swiss Francs to the dollar, but then we found the rate is 1.6. That makes things seem a bit more reasonable, but still not cheap.

We had planned to set up our base camp for two nights in Thun, thinking it would be cheaper than Interlaken while being close to it. We arrived in mid-afternoon, and found our way to the TI to inquire on a room.

Today, the Thun TI was not helpful. After struggling to get the attention of three or four staff people in an empty office, we were told that Mondays are when the private zimmers and pensions take the day off. They handed us a list of spendy hotels and left us on our own from there.

We hopped onto the next train for Interlaken.

Interlaken is on a waterway that joins two glacial lakes. Thun is at the western end of Lake Thun, and Interlaken is at the eastern end. Our train followed the south shore of Lake Thun while the sun was going down behind us, so we spent most of the half-hour train ride watching the sunlit mountains reflecting off the darkened lake.

Darkness was setting in as we arrived at Interlaken West station, which is the main station for finding hotels and other amenities. The other station – Interlaken Ost – is the departure point for the Jungfrau region.

We found a display board on the platform listing most (if not all) of the local accommodations with a street map of the neighborhood. It includes a key pad where you can enter a three-digit number for the place you’re interested in, and a light would start blinking on the map to show you where it is.

We headed for a combination hotel/hostel called the Happy Inn Lodge where a big jovial guy named Peter set us up with a nice double room for SF60. We dropped our packs onto our bed and set out to explore the town.

A few doors down the street we found a store with a plant in the window that would have been quite illegal in our part of the world. The proprietor said he did not have any, and directed us to another shop a few blocks away. At that store and at the next one, we were told to go to Thun.

Apparently the first guy we talked to had been shut down by the police, and everyone else in Interlaken was lying low for a while, though they all expressed an expectation that this product would be completely legal in Switzerland in the near future.

After being put off by the prices at the restaurants we’d found (still hadn’t recalculated the exchange rate), we went back to the Happy Inn for a light dinner and a couple of beers before spending the rest of the evening in our room writing stories for this blog.

Switzerland is an odd place language-wise. Most people speak German, some French, still others Italian, and a few in the southeast corner speak a Romany dialect we’ve never heard of. Bobber told us that Swiss German was hard to understand. To us it sounds like German with a French accent.

We’ve also heard German with an Italian accent, and French with a German accent. It seems customary for the language and the accent to not match.

Fortunately, everybody seems to speak fluent English… it must come with being in the hospitality business. We’ve met some who spoke with a fluency and an accent that seems to come straight from the studios of the BBC.