DK’s father, thus my uncle, came to visit Leukerbad for the festivities for the 1st of August and the four of us (DK had to work) walked to Inden over the Römerweg, yesterday. This is a route that has been in use for quite some time already, indeed also by the Romans. Later people like Goethe used it. Then this particular section became a railroad track from Leuk to Leukerbad, you can still see some traces of that: An old bridge with portals, bolts in the rock wall and the station buildings of Leukerbad and Inden are still in existence. Today, a ( much cheaper) bus connects the two towns and made the train unnecessary.

Underway, we came across the euhm… collection of houses called Bodmen and sat down at the Bodmenstübli restaurant. After a coffee, we continued our walk through Alpenwiesen and forests. When we finally arrived in Inden, we wanted to take the bus back to Leukerbad, but we missed it by merely six minutes, the next one would come one hour later.

Back in Leukerbad, we watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I had to explain afterwards :-)

Today is National Holiday, when the Swiss commemorate the birthday of the Confederation Helvetia, 714 years ago. The amount of Swiss flags and flags of all the cantons grew in the last week until almost every house has them. Streets are now red-and-white, luckily not as bad as some streets are orange when there is a football-match or something in the Netherlands (plus that red and white are pleasing for the eyes, while orange can seriously hurt them, especially when it’s overdone).

We’ll meet up with another uncle of mine who is in Switzerland, too and tonight, we’ll have original Swiss cheese fondue and fireworks at the Gemmi.

Oh, and it is cold, only 15 degrees currently… Very cold wind is coming down from the Gemmi pass. The sun will have to do its utmost best to make something out of this.