Squeezing these last Switzerland blogposts, a month later!

I only have technically 5 weeks of maternity leave before heading back to work. Time flies! I was hoping to extend the time if I had left my company, but unfortunately the job market is a little rough and nothing else in the market is interesting enough to me for me to justify the pay cut….so I might be stuck at my current company for as long as they’ll have me 😦 I was getting excited to start the new career chapter of my life, but maybe this isn’t the best time to start that. Guess we’ll see though. For now I’ll try to enjoy the rest of my leave, while interviewing a bit in the meantime just to continue to explore options. Even if I’m not starting the new career chapter of my life, I did just sign up for my first “sprint” triathlon to try to motivate myself to get my body back slowly over this next year, which means…training in the morning before the kids wake up. Not going to lie, it’s actually pretty nice feeling like I’ve accomplished something first thing in the morning, but I do need to go to sleep on time to be able to wake up on time which means my job needs to allow me to not have to work until 3 AM everyday.

This was the last part of our Lauterbrunnen leg of the trip, before heading over to Braunwald for our first kinderhotel experience! We had hoped to spend an afternoon in Wengen with our friends after Mannlichen, but ran out of time because of the aforementioned “easy” “kid-friendly” hike. So we went back the day after and spent the majority of the day exploring Wengen and the cute little ball runs around town. The train from Lauterbrunnen to Wengen is super scenic as well, with some of the best views of the valley. You can see the train coming into Lauterbrunnen and the kids were always so excited to go onto the train!

Our long train journeys from one side of the Alps to the other

Our journey from Lauterbrunnen to Braunwald, where our kinderhotel was, took us through the mountains via the train. It was all the way on the other side of the alps and would’ve taken around 6 hours door to door. We broke the train journey up by spending the day on one of the lake towns (Speiz), which was wonderful! I wish we had more time to do a boat journey or a full beach day at one of the lakes, but it would’ve been to much transit time and too difficult to rent a boat with the 3 kids. So this was a nice taste of lake life. There was also a nice castle that we could’ve visited, but the kids really just enjoyed playing in the sand, beach, and lake. Plus the beach area was down a pretty steep mountain from where the train dropped us off (we just put our luggage into lockers at the train station), and there was a music festival when we visited so the buses weren’t running to drop us back up the mountain.

A slightly overcast day, but still great for the lake! The lake is glacial so the water was way too cold for the kids. But the beach area had a giant lawn and a pool, and a sand area with toys, so they had a marvelous time.

This was such a short blogpost but I am not sure what else to say so will end it at that. See you at the next one!