Day 51 - Sunday 23 June - Gornergrat

Sunday 23 June

After breakfast in the sun on our deck,

 

we went for a quick walk to take some more photos of the mountain,
 

then went to the English Church for 10:00.  There were 8 in the congregation, probably not as many as in 2008, but it was a good service.  After morning tea, we headed back home to call Rachel for her HB, and made lunch while we were there.

We got the 13:15 cog railway train to Gornergrat.  It takes 33mins, and you climb to 3089m.

 

We walked up to the viewing platform, and mucked around with photos, stone piles, telescopes and other things for about 2 hours. 

 

 People have made piles of stones everywhere ..

 .. so I picked one for each of my family, big, middle-sized and smaller ..

 .. and made a tower so that everyone was there with us.

 D found that he could take photos through the special telescopes that had the names of the mountains written inside.

Then we decided to go back down, but by walking instead of the train.  This may have been a poor choice, because the path was not well marked.  We had to make our own way through snow drifts, and walk along the railway edge for a while until we got to Rotenboden.  It would probably have been better to catch the train 1 station, then walk to Riffelberg - shorter and more level. But we survived with a sense of achievement.

We were back in town by about 17:15, and checked out our railway plans for the rest of Switzerland, and got home for dinner.