Free chocolate milk at the Lucerne station as we headed off was a great start to the day. Only a quick trip to our next location of Brienz just 1.5 hours by train. Check in times for accomodation are very late in Europe - this one 4pm but we had arranged to drop off our bags early and then make the most of our travel pass by doing some travel related sightseeing for the rest if the day.

Our airbnb has stunning views across Lake Brienz, and is in a cute little village serviced by ferry, train and bus. We are pleased to be staying here for 5 days.
Our plans for the next few days are all scheduled around picking the best weather day to go up Jungfraujoch (top of Europe). We've been lucky with the weather this far but the forecast is for some rain over the next few days (snow on that mountain top). We had specifically allowed extra days in this area in case of bad weather to make sure we could get a good day to go up, and it looks like the best day is going to be Sat.

Another highly anticipated stop is the Grandhotel Giessbach on the edge of the lake and it's waterfalls - I would have liked to stay there but it's not the type of accomodation that caters to families - and even taking into consideration the higher costs of Switzerland it was well beyond our range, so a visit and a coffee will have to suffice.

Our plan for today was to take the ferry across the lake to Geissbach and then a walk up to an higher lake but we took a little too long at the supermarket and were just a little too late to catch it. As the next ferry wasn't for an hour and the forecast for the next few days was for rain, we decided to make the most of the cloudless day and go up the mountain instead.

Darryl chose a 100 year old open carriage steam train trip up to Rothorn. At 2214m it was an incredible height above the lake and the views were amazing. According to the information provided 693 of Switzerland peaks are visible - we identified a few peaks we are planning to visit. There was no snow up there but we could see other peaks in the distance with snow on them. We've been told it is unusually warm here for this time of year - it is early autumn and temp is still in the late 20's and only the odd few trees are starting to show autumn colours.

In winter the surrounding peaks are ski fields with some of the higher accomodation offering skiing from the door. We saw some Eidelweiss growing on the top of the mountain today (Switzerland national flower) - it wasn't really anything like I expected - very small and more cream than white. If it hadn't been labelled I wouldn't have identified it. We took a photo of it but they are stuck on the camera - but more about that later.

Just north of Brienz is an Airforce base - we didn't know that before we got here, but just after our arrival here 2 jets flew over the village, and as the day continued we saw another 6 jets - while they are quite high up the noise is incredibly loud in the village - probably amplified by the surrounding mountains.

A fairly relaxing day all up and a nice start to our time in Brienz.