Engelberg

Cloudy, rain and a bit nippy - what's going on?  After hot, dry weather in Italy with blue skies and temperatures in the high 30's every day this is a bit of a shock to the system.  Still - being such intrepid travellers we were prepared for all sorts of weather NOT!

So - of we went on our Engelberg adventure wearing sandals, shorts and t-shirts, which was fine for most of the day, they just proved a teensy bit inadequate right at the end, but more about that later.

Firstly - we checked out this monastery, complete with small cheese making room.  And it was here that we had our genuine Swiss lunch experience - cheese fondue. Unfortunately it was not to everyone's taste and three of the comments were gross, disgusting and ble.  I think it may have been the wine in it.  As a result - Emily's lunch consisted of about 7 cubes of bread.

After fuelling up we hit the slopes, starting with a ride up the cable car....

The views were spectacular...

It was quiet at the top, actually it wasn't quite the top of the mountain and we decided to take a one hour walk that took in a higher peak and then looped back down.  All good and here's what we saw on the way...

More beautiful scenery with swings and seats placed in all the right spots to take in the best of the views.

All was good, we were having a ball and then it happened.  A massive clap of thunder, followed by another and then the heavens opened.  Not just rain, but hail!  We were drenched in seconds, the road turned into a mini-river and remember what I said about our clothes and footwear being inadequate - it was just about now that that became painfully obvious.

We spent a few miserable minutes sheltering under a sparse tree (that was also a bit inadequate) trying to decide whether it was better to shelter or just keep going - I mean we couldn't get any wetter.

We did press on, Jem lost his thongs and I slipped out of my slip-ons (renamed to slip-offs as of now) as we waded through what was now a stream.  After about 20 minutes we reached a cafe, burst in dripping and grabbed the attention of about 10 elderly Swiss hikers.  They just looked at us, saturated and dripping - there was no need for words!

Here's a picture of us impersonating drowned rats.

Unfortunately we had further to go and once sufficiently recovered on we went.  Here we are pressing on part 2.

Back in the car we had the heater going full blast and I drove my reg grundies (I know, I know - too much info - I only included it to emphasise how wet we were and the necessity to remove wet duds).

Back in the hotel, snuggled under excellent doonas we were able to have a weak laugh about it.