Switzerland - Jungfraujoch

Another of our highlights in Switzerland was on Thursday, Oct. 29. We found out that the train tickets we had purchased allowed the girls free passes to go up to the Jungfraujoch which is the highest train station in Europe and quite expensive to get to. That was enough to convince us to do it and we're so glad we did. It took nearly two and half hours to travel up to this mountain and inside it -much of it on a rack rail train - the only kind that won't slide back down! We saw some incredible views on the way up - one in the picture is of the Lauterbrunnen Valley with the incredible Staubbach Falls. As we ascended we began to see the glaciers up close - they kind of have a bluish cast to them and look like they are "oozing" down the mountains. The railway and the building at the top are quite amazing engineering feats. The main viewing platform is literally balancing on the tip of the mountain - it's pretty weird to look down through the grated floor and look down and down and down some more! Obviously the panorama was amazing. When we got up there our first opportunity to go outside was super windy, very icy and FREEZING. Europeans are not nearly as safety conscious as Americans. Here we are out on this icy mountain top, people are falling left and right and there is only a little rope around the edge. It's amazing that people don't slide right off the mountain. I was the only one in our family that stayed vertical - Jay even wiped out and slid down a ways!! Crazy! The main viewing area was much calmer and beautiful(safer too!) and overlooked a huge glacier called the Aletsch Glacier. It looks like a massive river flowing between the mountains. It is enormous and as we were out on the platform two fighter jets flew through the glacial valley at incredible speeds - it was amazing to see how small they were compared to these mountains. There is a huge structure inside the mountain that houses the train station, a research center, a bunch of restaurants, souvenir shops (of course) and the Ice Palace which was one of the girls' favorites. We had fun walking through the Ice Palace - an area carved into the glacier. It is like a cave that is completely ice and has a number of ice sculptures throughout it. We caught the last train of the day and so we had time to go through it twice. The second time we were all alone and it was quite weird to realize that we were 8500 feet above ground inside a glacier and no one else is around - talk about isolated!! It was a great day and we were glad that it was off season and didn't have to wait in any lines or elbow our way to the front to see the views. (If you want to see any of the pictures blown up you can just click on them.)