Day Two

A bright light, resembling what I thought was yellow, banged on my eyelids. I was forced to get up, finding the window and door open and my dad standing near them. We all got up and after a little bit of delay, including watching some Olympics, went down to have breakfast. I had plain yogurt with muesli and corn flakes. And some bread with strawberry jam and a hard-boiled egg. After that we went outside with our boots. I inhaled through my nose, and the scent immediately made me happy. A cool, crisp, fresh whiff. So goosd. One of the best smells ever. Mountain air at 9:45 a.m. Just wonderful.

At 10:15 we started out on the big hike. We had to bring two backpacks, one of which me and Zach switched off carrying every hour or so. I started out with it. It wasn't too heavy. The trail didn't have hardly any steep parts at first and was mostly flat. Some Swiss Army jets passed us, which caused us to stop and look up. We stopped an awful lot on this hike to drink water and take pictures and whatnot. We talked about Italy, the science of clouds, and other assorted topics. We passed lots of German/Swiss people, and I maybe muttered a small "Guten Tag" once or twice. We saw a steep bike trail or two, which I would never want to do. There were lots of cows. And we also smelled that wonderful scent.

After a few hours the trail got a little more challenging. More rocky, more of a climb. It zig-zagged up the grassy mountain, allowing us a great view. There were lots of cliffs too, which were sort of freaky. We saw part of a glacier far away after a little bit. We also found some blueberries before lunch. They were goosd. We also used the binoculars and saw this one mountain house like right next to a cliff. Geez. After lunch, which consisted of yogurt, blueberries, bread, cheese and chocolate, we continued on the trail. There were some small shrines or whatever on the trail and also little plaques for people that died. Depressing stuff.

Then we finally got to see the main attraction.

It was like a bunch of dirty cream poured over rocks, making a smooth platform. With lots of dirt and brown. There was a small river flowing towards it, and some chunks of ice farther away from the main glacier. We walked down, getting closer to it. As I got closer, something made me say "woah". At first I just saw the white and brown-ish color. But then there was this blue-ish tint at the end, and it looked like a sponge. It looked like a blue-raspberry snow-cone. I took a ton of pictures and got to touch it. It was cold. Felt like a weird form of ice. This one guy had gone really close to it, like almost in it, but we didn't go quite that close. There were little caves and stuff. It was so cool! The air around it was chilly, but not that much. There was this water that was reddish (looked like cow blood) that flowed down the rocks. It was really slippery.

As my dad put it, we could see "global warming in action,". It was dripping, that's for sure. Dripping a lot. But it was still there. It was Europe's biggest glacier. Al Gore was right. I never doubted him, but this just proved it. Humans are stupid. We're smart in a way, but our decisions are mostly from emotion. This is stupid. What we're doing right now. What we're not doing, really. We eventually continued on the trail, leaving the glacier behind. I couldn't really figure out how I felt after seeing the glacier. It was cool, but I felt mad. I was sad. I was mad as heck. I could go on and on about how stupid we are. But I won't. Maybe in another post. But seriously.

Anyway. So after seeing the glacier up close, we could see more views of it from up high. The next trail we were on had mountain goats. At first my mom thought they were dangerous because they had horns, but then Zach was just like, "I don't think they'd let dangerous animals on this trail," so we just walked past. They looked kinda freaky though.

I walked pretty far ahead of my family because they were slow and I wanted to get home fast because it was supposed to rain. And this way I could stop to take pictures more. Then something interesting happened. I was walking ahead as usual, and saw two mountain goats a little bit ahead of me on the trail. I said hi to them (I say hi to mountain goats a lot) and tried to walk past. The bigger one (probably like the mom because there was this other smaller one) stopped and sort of bumped into me. I was sort of scared for a second, because I thought, this guy could push me over the mountain easily with those strong horns, but nothing bad happened. Instead, it started licking my jacket. It was somewhat weird. It just started randomely licking it. I said out loud, "Yeah, ok....um yeah...ok," somewhat loud. I looked over at the goat and noticed it's eyes. They were black and looked sort of happy. I started smiling and tried to push away the goat. "Um yeah ok, how about you go eat grass now?" the goat then like rubbed me with it's leg. My mom and Zach walked past, sort of laughing. It kept licking me. Then my dad came over on the trail and had some sense. He pushed the mountain goat away and said, "Go, go- he'll start eating your-" so I walked past the goat, hearing it baa-ing. My dad said that the goats probably got food from people, so that's why it was like eating me. Well, licking my jacket. That was funny.

So we just kept walking. I was ahead of the rest of my family still, stopping occasionally to wait for them. We passed some cows. Cows have very intimidating stares. I just give them my teeth smile and walk along. Finally we got to the town. It was getting dark and stormy sort of. We went to the restaurant where we got drinks the other day. It was goosd. I was hungry, but not as much as day one. I sort of fell asleep waiting for the food. I ordered a salad and Spetzla (I spelled that wrong). It's a german dish- sort of like eggy, batter-y, and bread-y. You normally have it with meat. It wasn't as goosd as how Omi (my dad's step mom who's German) makes it. But it was still goosd. I didn't finish all of it, and tried some of my family's dishes. I tried a chesnut from Zach's meal, and it tasted weird. Not sure I liked it. I also noticed on the menu that the horse meat came from USA. Weird. During the meal, we could see it getting darker outside and the storm coming in. When we walked outside, it was raining pretty hard. But the drops were small. It still was very wet.

A few feet down the road from the restaurant, I saw a dark shape near my dad's foot. I recognized it after a few seconds and shouted out in a strange voice that didn't sound like mine, "FROG!!! FROG!!! It's a frog!!!" Then we watched as the big amphibian jumped it's way towards the restaurant. I looked over at my dad and we laughed. It was a big frog. Then my mom said, "'A see of frogs,'" quoting what Michelle said once, trying to say "fog". It was funny. So we kept walking towards our mountain house, getting wet. Then I saw another frog and yelled, "It's another FROG!!!!" It was so funny. Ha! Those were big frogs. We couldn't see the mountains at all that night because of the fog. It was cool. My shorts were really wet when I took off my boots. I took a shower and watched some Mr. Bean on the German TV. It was so funny.

It was dark outside, raining. That hike took us 9 hours when it was supposed to take like 6. Heh. So then I went to bed, sleeping happily.