Hiking in Gryon!

It’s common knowledge that if you are living in Geneva and you spend three consecutive weekends in town, you‘ll end up with a voracious cheese addiction that has no known cure. While we’re always happy to have an excuse to eat more cheese, rather than take any chances we decided to take a quick getaway to the lovely Swiss town of Gryon late Friday night!

The only problem with taking the last train out of town is that when you arrive to your destination, it’s already dark. This has happened to us a couple of times, and you’d think we’d learn, but we don’t…so once again, we found ourselves walking around in the mountains in pitch-blackness, with only the sounds of cowbells in the distance keeping us company.

The hostel we stayed at was quite nice, by hostel standards. Most students are between travel seasons right now, so we had the place mostly to ourselves, except for the owners and a handful of their friends, who all happened to be around the same age as us. I’m thinking the whole hostel-owning thing is a great way to make a living, although it would get boring in the mountains, as there isn’t a whole lot else to do other than, well, hike and ski. The town of Gryon is basically a handful of houses, with a small grocery store and a butcher shop. As the butcher shop was top notch, and the hostel had a barbecue grill, we were able to make some awesome steaks, which was almost worth the cost of the trip in and of itself. Hey - good steaks are hard to come by here!

The only unfortunate thing was that the weather wasn’t being cooperative with us. We got up early Saturday to go on a hike, and about halfway into it the clouds rolled in. As a result, we had to cut the hike a little short, and rather than go up the mountain we were planning on hiking, we took another trail around it, which was probably better anyway since we got to see some cows. Cows still rule! We then spent the rest of the day sitting around the hostel as the rain and fog doused Gryon. In honor of the weather, we watched “The Mist”, a movie from last year where monsters come out of the fog and eat people.

Sunday we came home a little early, for two reasons. One - it’s kind of pointless to be in the mountains when you can’t see more than three feet in front of you. Two - it’s the beginning of football season! This year, the NFL finally got their act together and are offering a service to anyone outside of the US that allows you to watch the games online, so we tried that out. Considering we saw a grand total of 1 game last year, it’s going to be nice getting back into sports that aren’t completely inane (you know who you are, soccer!)

Next: Greece!