Happiness is a Mountain called Mannlichen - Sunday 22nd June

We need to leave at 08:30 Barbara announced as we blurry eyed stumbled to bed after a few bottles of red and countless wheat beers at about 23:20. 8 hours later I stumbled down the stairs for breakfast. It had been a restless night, with rock music being played until the early hours of the morning, with the crows taking over a couple of hours later not helping my hangover a great deal.

I think we finally left at about something o'clock to make our way to Grund at the foot of Mannlichen, 7,317 feet tall. This also happens to be one of the stations for the Jungfrau (13,642 feet) Although you need to change at Kleine Scheidegg and also fork out a mean SwissFrancs 170 for a return trip, I satisfied myself with just watching the trains come and go on this rack railway with a nice ice cold beer in my hand, a mere SwissFrancs 5 together with a bowl of chips only SwissFrancs 7 a bowl, that's well over a fiver.

Anyway having arrived at Grund following a really nice drive up into the Alps we purchased tickets on the cable car to take us up to the top of the mountain. These tickets would also cover us for the decent from halfway down the mountain.

I'm a seasoned cable car traveller having used the Emirates cable car between the Excel Centre and the O2, so I was not fazed by the low hung car which provided great views of all the surrounding mountains, Wetterhorn, Schreckhorn, Eiger, Monch, Jungfrau, Breithorn and Tschingelhorn, and a couple marmots. Having admired the view we descended to the cable car station at Holenstein. This was a pleasant walk and it was great to see so many young children enjoying it as well. The walk is themed to a rabbit character called Felix and all along the route down there where different places where the rabbit was hidden for children to find, together with an assortment of play objects including little huts on stilts, cow udders to milk, alpine horns to blow and a flying fox to whizz down. A far cry to my time with Sarah hiding smarties left by the smarty man.

We stopped near the local cows, the bovine kind, with their huge bells ding donging whenever they moved their heads, which must drive them mad! Having arrived back at Holnstein we caught the cable car back to Grund and retired to the bar for aforementioned ice cold beers.

On the way back I dozed most of the way, on arrival back at Nechatel we were entertained to a small electrical storm.

A nice day was had by all.