This was scheduled to be a quiet and restful day where we were only going to take a boat ride in Lake Brienze- one of the two lakes that sandwiched Interlocken. The boat was definitely interesting-a steam powered Side-wheeler built in 1899. Much of the machinery was open to view and you could see the engineer working the controls. The commands were piped down to him via speaker tubes. No software issues here to be concerned about. We lazily steamed along the shore admiring the small villages and not so small mansions. Somewhere we found out we could get off at the far end of the lake and take a coal powered cog train deep onto the Alps. Game on and change of plans. We hopped off the boat and soon boarded our train. Turned out we had one of the newer engines-it was powered by burning recycled vegetable oil, not coal. It was a short ride-about 5 miles-but was more vertical than horizontal.

The cars were open and the scenery going up was absolutely incredible. Different from the other day, we travelled through areas that were actively settled and farmed. How I don’t know. The area was very steep, but we saw crops being raised and cattle grazing-maybe they were 3/4 cow and 1/4 mountain goat or something. Once we reached the summit, we were looking across and seeing the area we visited a couple of days ago. I think you will find the pictures incredible , but they don’t do justice to what we were actually seeing. The trip down was a rerun of going up, but we saw many sights we missed seeing going up. When we returned to our starting point, we only had to figure how to get home, since our boat had departed long ago. Fortunately I am traveling with some ingenious friends.