Night Sledding in Interlaken!

Last weekend our group made its first official trip to Interlaken in Switzerland. The town is known for extreme sports which is right up my alley! We rented a charter bus and off we went after class on a three and a half hour trip. Thank goodness we left early because it is customary for drivers to get a ten minute smoke and eat break on top of our driver pulling over to let the 20 cars stuck behind us ahead every 20 minutes. When we were almost there we actually got stuck in a car crash on the side of a mountain... Which means there is NO way to turn around or pass the accident safely. Not to worry though folks I brought some cooking wine on the bus. When we finally got to interlaken we had thirty minutes to get ready and then book it to our night sledding package!

The bus!

WARNING: Mom please stop reading here and pretend I had a nice fondue dinner and an early night.

Look mom our bus was volvo! I made one safe decision this weekend wooo!

All 44 of the students and I took a bus to a gondola to another gondola to the top of the mountain. Along the way we met a nice little family with boots, helmets,and headlamps. That is when the red flags started kicking in that I had none of the items they had. When we asked them if we needed head lamps they laughed and said yes and looked at us with pitty. In hindsight this all seems so dumb but at the time I was imagining sledding in crestwood farms and how if she could my mom would have required us to wear helmets sledding so maybe it was just a protective family? Nope, wrong again Tessa you are in the freaking Swiss Alps get it together.

This is one of my best friends on the trip her name is Val and she is super cool! Woo I made friends who'd a thunk.

nom

game time focus action shot.

At the top of the mountain we met our guide Sam who assured us that "Yes, it is a little dangerous but fun. You will go!" however first we had to eat our fondue dinner which seemed like a genius idea at first to eat my body weight in cheese before I propelled myself down a mountain. Wrong again. The waiter set us up with our kettle of Swiss cheese with a healthy helping of cooking wine in it (I am officially an expert on the taste after all) and we chowed down on bread and potatoes smothered in cheese! The waiters kept bringing us bread basket after bread basket simultaneously while shh-ing us . A group of 44 Americans is basically a natural disaster in a European restaurant. After the feast I can safely say I never want to look at a pot of cheese again, because then Sam (who I begged to go down the mountain with me) give us sleds and said off you go! Once again, I didn't realize that 1 hour and half of sledding meant that hypothetically you are supposed to sled 3 times because you are sledding down a monster of a mountain.

The weather conditions that day in interlaken were rainy which meant the snow froze at night and it was very foggy. Perfect right? Mom please stop reading now... I know you ignored my first warning.

So I flung my self down the mountain screaming with my feet out and only a set of lights on ONE side of the track that you could hardly see. The beauty of this was when you put your feet down to slow down the snow goes up in your face and blinds you. Steering was also an art that I have never been able to master so I would fling my body left and right around the curves and dips. When this failed I would either fall into a bank of a foot of snow, hit someone else, or roll off and run after my sled. When I finally made it down the mountain my adrenaline was rushing but I was also mildly afraid I would never have children after the damage I did to my body. Sooo like the smart, intelligent, reasonable girl I am I went down the mountain again. This time I only flipped over my sled once and saw a girl to run straight into a light post to realize this was a bad decision. By the second time through I frozen cold and we had to wait 45 minutes for a bus to come get us. True to the American way we started a chant when the local transit bus finally came and convinced the driver to take us straight to the hostel instead of making us walk 20 min. Wooo successful night! Luckily, everyone made it off the mountain and only one girl scraped up her whole face. My ankles were so swollen and my body was so bruised though that I fell asleep on the bus and passed out in our hostel.

I love everyone, being alive, and cheese!

I look slightly mental here...