In 2021, when I first had S, I had exactly 0 mom friends. I had a co-worker I was close to (who is now still a good friend) who had a baby, and who talked me through her birthing / etc experiences, but other than that I truly knew no one except instagram acquaintances who had kids. Both I and my husband were (are!) on the extremely young side to have kids – especially in our circle of northeast city, nonreligious group of friends who all have at least one grad degree – and so we didn’t really have a group of people in our generation to rely on for advice. (Funny now because at Catherine’s last party, we had 70+ of our favorite local parent friends come…who we all consider really good friends now. And my 2023 and 2025 mom whatsapp groups have approximiately 10000+ messages a day.)

A few months after I got pregnant, I found out that one of our closest grad school friends in Boston were also expecting around the same time! And thus she became my first mom friend. I remember vividly prepping homemade meals together before the babies came. She was due 2 months after I was, and I remember dropping off some food and feeling like I had so much advice to give from everything I learned the last few weeks, because no matter how much you read online, nothing will prepare you for the insanity of postpartum than actually doing it. We navigated learning how to breastfeed together and complaining about how our bodies felt funky. Once they graduated, we went our separate ways – us to NYC and them to Switzerland, where our friend had gotten a professorship at a university there. We had our second children in two different countries, and we hadn’t seen each other since 2022.

So of course when we went to the country of Switzerland, we had to try to make a meetup work…and they drove 3 hours to come meet up with us for a day. The girls were reunited, and we joked about how maybe they still remembered the pheromones from each other when they were babies because they were so instantly comfortable with each other? They hadn’t hung out since they were around a year old, so it was really fun seeing them interact with each other.

We decided to spend the day going up to Mannlichen for the day and then having dinner at our Airbnb in Lauterbrunnen. C (my friend) is one of the best cooks I know, and we have so many memories of sharing delicious group meals together, so we were extremely excited for a night of fondue and BBQ. It was a perfect day, maybe my favorite day of the whole trip!

The Cow Alpine Herdsman Playground at the top of Mannlichen

Lunch at the playground and preparing the embark upon the trail

Mannlichen is reached by going through Wengen – we were hoping spend some time in the town after going up to Mannlichen, but we ended up running out of time. We took the cable car up to Mannlichen, where it was a short walk to the Cow Alpine Herdsman playground. We spent some time at this playground, again, beautiful, clean, and uncrowded, and had lunch here. There is a large cafeteria and open air seating for food, drinks, and essentials if you didn’t pack lunch. You can also pick up trail maps for the “Liselotte” trail.

After hanging out at the playground, we embarked on the extremely kid-friendy Liselotte Trail. The map came with cute pictures of cartoon cows, and there were 13 stops along the way to get stamps. So, the group of us, with two 4-year olds, two 2-year olds, and a newborn baby headed down the mountain to stroll down the trail.

I forgot we were in the Alps. We didn’t bring hiking backpacks or waterproof gear, because we had bright sunny days the last few days and I was tired of bringing our rainjackets when we already had 3-kids worth of stuff to bring. We couldn’t even bring hiking backpacks anyway, especially because T had aged out of his a while ago. We took a leisurely stroll down the mountain to the first stop, which took around….30 minutes. And realized there were 12 more stops to make before we finished the trail.

Some of the fun stops along the way

The views were beautiful, and the girls did an amazing job finishing most of the trail. The trail was actually extremely kid-friendly, with not many places to trip and mostly downhill. Each stop along the trail had a little kid-friendly interactive play area, and we felt lucky to be in such an amazing place.

And then the skies opened up.

We ran down the rest of the trail as fast as we could, taking shelter at the limited stops and the one lone tree on the entire mountain. We alternated backpack carriers to carry the 2 year olds, and alternated carrying the 4 year olds when needed (thankfully they did a great job and hiked most of the way, but the last half hour stretch was a little tougher!). Thankfully our friends had a raincover for the baby. By the time we got to the last stop, we were soaked – but exhilarated that we had made it to the bottom of the trail, and spent a good amount of time playing on the last playground (which included a fun zip line overlooking a cliffside and a giant pirate ship).

Making it to the end of the trail

When we had our fill, we walked over to the cable car to take us back up the mountain to Mannlichen, and realized that we were 2 minutes away from catching the very last cable car before it shut down for the day. I’m not sure what we would’ve done had we spent even an extra minute on the trail! We took a fun “karaoke” cable car and spent the ride up singing Frozen and Oasis songs.

By the time we got back to Mannlichen, we also got there in time to take the very last cable car from Mannlichen back to Wengen…talk about close timing! We had quite the adventure all day and were happy to pick up some groceries and end the night with some delicious fondue and barbeque. This was one of my favorite days on the trip, made that much more fun that we got to reunite with our old friends.

Fondue at the end of the day – we survived and got back!