Euro Day 47 - SOW Day 4

Friday, 9 August 2019

Today I once again failed to show the good people of Switzerland that I am a competent orienteer.

I just can't seem find any controls once the visibility gets low. Today I did well apart from the only difficult control on our course were I lost nearly 8 minutes - dang! Nevertheless we all had a good day out. Everyone else seemed to go ok although Jon complained that he just couldn't see the controls once he got close to them. Here's the video from today.

The event centre was a 15 minute chairlift from the next train station past Gstaad (interestingly it turns out Gstaad is where the train officially changes language from the French on the Chateau D'oex side, to German on the other - all the information suddenly switched over!) We've noticed this in a few spots actually. One minute we're not understanding French, the next we're clueless in German - we're so versatile!

Anyway this morning was really foggy so it was fun to be taken right up through the clouds to the clear blue sky on the other side! The views from the top were fantastic. Look at that sea of fog below us, compared with the view when we came down later in the day

From the chairlift we had a 10 minute walk to the event centre, then I had a 2km walk to the start along a beautiful flat trail with amazing views, and goats! We're certainly getting our money's worth of amazing views at this event.

So many cows. Today I practically had to push them out of my way as I raced past them - they aren't bothered by humans.

We all had early starts, which meant we had to get up at 5.45am and leave the house at 6.15am. The benefit of this was that we were able to complete some of our failed excursions from yesterday. Firstly we went to the chocolate factory and did the tour - it was really good and there were ample samples to be had. We also booked ahead so we didn't have to wait.

On the way there yesterday I noticed we drove through a small town where the train tracks seemed to veer away from the fields and come straight down the main street. I was wondering how this worked and today we got to see it!! The train came right past us, followed by a procession of cars that had had to wait for it to get in front of them. It reminded us of the one lane bridges in NZ that also serve as train bridges and in one case, an emergency landing strip.

On that train note, we've been on Swiss trains 8 times now, and I reckon we've had 7 different styles of carriage. We got to sit in first class today as the 2nd class train was full !

Once we'd finished at the Chocolate factory we headed back to Chateau D'oex we picked Paul up (he was hiking down the valley to meet us) and went up to play frisbee golf. Once again the views were fantastic. The golf was fun, the only bummer was that Paul managed to beat us all despite having had 3 beers while he waited for us! It was close though, another few holes and I'm sure we'd have had him - either that or he would have laid down for a nap in the sun.