Day 16 - 17: Chateau de Chillon and Zermatt to Lucerne

We got up early today because we wanted to visit the Chillon Castle in Mountrex before we hopped on a train to go to Zermatt, Switzerland for the night.

The view of the castle as we approached was breathtaking with Lake Geneva and the Swiss Alps in the background. The medieval castle was built on a rock on the banks of Lake Geneva.

 The picture below is from inside one of the castle towers looking out to where Clint and Ariande were standing.

Supposedly, this castle was the image used for Eric's castle from The Little Mermaid. We think Ariadne was expecting a Disney interior because she commented that the "inside was just rocks and wood." We enjoyed peering out of the tower windows and holes they used to shoot weapons at the enemies below. We climbed up to the keep and looked around the weapons room.

We left the castle and got on a train to go to Zermatt, Switzerland.

Before strolling to our hotel, we found a playground along the way. While Ariadne enjoyed the monkey bars and swings, Clint and Theresa enjoyed the view of the famous Matterhorn! It's the mountain on the Toblerone chocolates! Unfortunately, it was a cloudy day, so we couldn't see the very top of the peak. We ended the evening with a homecooked dinner and a swim in the underground pool in our hotel!

The next morning we had breakfast at the hotel and debated whether it would be worth the ticket price to take the Gornergrat Railway, a cogwheel train which would ascend to  the Gornergrat ridge at 10,135 ft! According to our research, "Check the weather forecast as there's no point in going up if the Gornergrat and the surrounding mountains are covered in clouds. "  Well, it was another cloudy day, but most of the other mountains were visible except Matterhorn's peak. So.... here's a picture of the Matterhorn on our way up Gornergrat railway!! 

 As we ascended to the top, we had no regrets of our decision. The views were spectacular! We had packed a lunch so we enjoyed lunch at the top and threw snowballs at each other in the middle of June!!

We had planned on hiking down Gornergrat at Riffelberg, but were told by the hotel and tourist office that it was closed due to snow and we didn't have the proper gear on. When we stopped at Riffelberg on the way down, we didn't see very much snow on the trails. We asked the waiters at the restaurant and they said it was hikeable. They said it would take 45 minutes to hike to the next stop. This was plenty of time for us to catch our next train to Lucerne. We also met a German couple that was about to hike down themselves, so we decided to join them!

The first 10 minutes of the hike was great! We enjoyed seeing the rushing stream caused by the snow melt. We even giggled as we took a picture of Ariadne on a sled that was left on the trail with no snow in sight. How fun we thought it would be to say we sled down the Alps! Little did we know what awaited us!

About 20 minutes into our hike, we hit a huge pile of snow. We considered giving up and heading back up, but Ariadne wanted to keep going. So, we took an alternate path down the mountain to the path below. Thinking we had cleared the toughest hurdle, we then came to a rushing stream of snow melt coming down the mountain. It was definitely too wide and fast to go through and would have left our shoes and pants soaking wet for the rest of the hike. The German man thought he could walk across the snow and water. However, his wife disagreed and suggested we hike all the way down to where the stream was smaller and slower. We liked her suggestion and began our descent down to just cross the stream and come all the way back up to the trail. Below is a video of our descent.

Here is a picture of the bottom of the stream to where we started. After we took this picture, we had to hike all the way back up to find the trail again!!

We made it back to the top to get back on the trail. We hit a few more snow piles and snow melts, but we were able to get through with just some wet shoes and bottoms. We didn't have a nice sled, but we definitely did some sliding on our bottoms down the Alps! And... we had a great view of the Matterhorn the whole time!

After an hour and a half (not 45 minutes), we made it to the next train station...barely! We were running and the ticket man was telling us to hurry because we were holding up the train. Here's a picture of our descent down one train stop to the next!

We treated ourselves to some Swiss hot chocolate before boarding a train to Lucerne.