Good morning! As I am writing these posts in quick(ish) succession, there is not much to update about in our lives since the last post, although I did want to take a moment to brag about M!

This past weekend he swum over 3 miles across the Hudson River (from Nyack to Sleepy Hollow)…and came in 2nd place. We were just planning on a finisher medal, and then he completely crushed it. Casual!

M has been training throughout the summer at our local (outdoor) rec pool and has most recently transitioned to swimming at the Y in the mornings. Now that it’s been a few months of baby C sleeping through the night, I feel ready to also start building some new habits. I remember only 2 months ago, a friend had asked me to join 8 AM pickleball with her, and that felt SUPER EARLY…and now we are back to a normal kid schedule. I have never been a morning person, but part of this new chapter in life is starting new habits, so I too am committing to waking up early to get a jumpstart to my day before the kids wake up (although for me, this will look like a normal 6 AM wake up instead of a…7:20 AM wakeup. Lucky our kids are good sleepers!

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Back to pictures of our trip – we spent one day going to Gimmelwald & Grindelwald, although it didn’t necessarily make logical sense to do both in the same day. Gimmelwald was an easy and beautiful cable car ride from the end of Lauterbrunnen valley, and was a highlight of our trip. Gimmelwald truly felt like a little alp village. Wengen and Murren, on the other hand, are also car-free villages, but are much more dense and built up.

Gimmelwald felt like the town existed not for tourists but for itself. There was a little downtown with a playground, but other than that the roads led through little chalets and farms.

Cablecar journey to Gimmelwald

The “downtown” area included the famous “honesty shop”, which is basically payment without a serviced cashier. These were similar to all the alpkases (cheese houses) all throughout our trip, which were little fridges tied to a family’s houses with cheese and sometimes jam, sausage, and drinks inside. Passengerby can leave cash, on the honor system, in return for the local cheese. Apparently the cheese in this area and during this time are made in super small quantities as the cows are free-ranging, and then in September they descend from the Alps down to the “cities” where their milk is made into cheese for more wide consumption.

We spent the morning here wandering through the village, looking for farm animals and watching the paragliders. If we were without kids, we would’ve done a long hike or biked through the hills! But with a 4, 2, and 0 year old, we were satisfied just slowly roaming through town.

A charming walk through Gimmelwald – fresh water troughs, farm animals, cheese houses, and great views.

In the afternoon, we travelled to Grindelwald. This was the hardest town to get to from Lauterbrunnen, and I’m glad we didn’t end basing our time there. If our kids were older and we were able to do more of the adventure things, we might’ve considered it more, but we found the town quite built up and busier, so there was more to do…but the village was much less charming than the others we had visited. The tobaggan, cliff walk, and “highest point of Europe” all are located around here, but we didn’t do any of them as they weren’t really young-kid friendly (and the Jungfraujoch highest point of Europe expedition was extremely expensive).

An afternoon stroll through Grindelwald

We were happy to have visited both villages though, and highly recommend a leisurely day in Gimmelwald if you have the time!