Just a quick post - and more...

Hey everybody!

Just a quick post as I am at a Mac reseller and probably shouldn't be writing this here...

The day after our last post Emilie and I hiked 4 hours for a 200m climb. The panorama from the top was superb and we really enjoyed the climb. Very clean rock with a little bit of everything. Only problem with the climb is that it was sport bolted with approximatly 2 bolts per pitch... they were there when we needed them I suppose.

Oops, I got kicked off and have to start again... well not again but anyway from here I start.

The climb we had done was on a little mountain called the Reifflhorn. Theoretically it was supposed to be a crag used as training for the Matterhorn, I dunno about that though. Even after hiking all day, I still didn't get the impression that we were doing anything near to the difficulty of the Matterhorn. Regardless it was fun.

The following day Emilie and I left Zermatt, we intended to head back to Italy and try to climb Gran Paradiso. However, it seems that it was not to be as my eye had not yet become well enough to go onto a Glacier. So back to the hospital we went, where we found that the previous doctor was an idiot and I needed a stronger perscription. We didn't end up attempting Gran Paradiso. Insted we went back to Switzerland and did a bit of sight seeing. It really wasn't all that exciting actually. I think that we are getting a bit jaded as we have been sightseeing for 3 months and kinda want to stop seeing sights.

Bern was a nice town. A few nice sights. However, they had captive bears and it was pretty sad to see them in their concrete environment. We watched transformers in Bern and found out that the swiss need to have a 10 minute break in the middle of all their movies... it was quite odd.

After Bern we drove to Lucerne. Another nice town but not really much to do but walk around. We did the walk and it was nice. The next day we went to Zurich. Zurich was an interesting city. Very full of people. There was supposed to be an electricity in the air, but I didn't see it. Zurich ended up being very expensive as I was nabbed by the police travelling through a red light about 1 second too late. They have short Yellows in Switzerland.

The next day we went to Interlaken. Turns out that in order to have fun in Interlaken you need to spend a ton of money. We left shortly after arriving. And went to Grimsel Valley.

Grimsel Valley is a nice Glacier carved valley with a TON of granite slab. We spent a day sampling a slab route and decided that while it was fun, slab is not really our thing. We had intended to climb a couple of crack routes today but the weather moved in and isn't going to lift until Friday. So we moved on.

Right now we are in Lugano just north of Milan. We are heading back to Val del Mello (where we visited 2 months ago) to climb what is supposed to be the nicest climb in the alps. It's a 5.10a dihedral route and we have high hopes.

Stay tuned!