Gruyeres, Switzerland

Posted on March 15, 2024  •  13 minutes  • 2599 words

Not much planned for this weekend, just wanted a place to escape our terrible AirBnb. I had reserved a rental car thinking we’d do a easy mountain get away and easy it was! Our big suitcase and bike box were still and Yuhao’s place. Dan biked to pick up the car and came back to get us, we loaded up, and we headed to Gruyeres. With my back, I finally decided to risk the stress of Dan driving and me navigating. To be fair (to me), other people have told me what an amazing navigator I am. Numerous. Dan thinks I’m the worst. Anyways, in the car and driving out of town, Dan was already stressed. He said the guys at the rental place were rattling off rules for driving…yellow buses always get the right of way, but not blue…arrows in street mean right or way, or do they mean yield? This didn’t help either.

Should I have driven, probably. 10 minutes into the drive and I realize when Dan ran up to grab the suitcases, he didn’t grab our food in the fridge. It was a lot of food, and it was lunch, so we went back to get that. Tensions were high, but we make it out of town. Kids were planning something in the backseat together, which made for a pretty easy drive…and short.

We climbed a bit and the views of Lake Geneva were stunning!

And then a 90deg turn to the north and we were pointed right at the mountains.

So we were actually staying at the base of a small ski mountain about 5 minutes past Gruyeres and we were there in an hour. We could check in as I’m pretty sure we were the only overnight guests that night. The bonus of the shoulder season. Not ski season and not full hiking season yet. I guess it’s snowshoe season, but doesn’t seem to have a massive following. Our room was perfect, there was a communal kitchen and a playground right outside.

We ate lunch at the picnic tables and the kids played in the playground. Not wanting to get in the car again, but no wanting to sit around, we decided to hike right up the mountain. There were trails that more or less went right up the ski slopes and some that went around, but we went for high elevation gain, low distance covered.

Weather was perfect, but we could see clouds rolling in. You could see all the way up the valley.

As we were walking right up, we took lots of breaks. And to be honest, we are all a bit out of hiking shape. We’ve walked miles around cities, but not the same as walking up a mountain.

We got to the top and the weather turned. I really wanted to do a loop behind and around, but we weren’t dressed for it and I think we were all tired after the week. Jackets on and Dan and Ben talked about this being the entrance to some Lord of the Rings place. J. R. R. Tolkien got some of his inspiration for places in the book from when he was hiking in Switzerland.

Since getting to the top, we walked about 10 minutes before we decided to turn around. Knowing energy was low before the hike, I had grabbed some Haribo gummies that the kids had loved when we were in France. Kids were lagging a bit, so I busted the out.

We got to where the trail started down again and now it was decently raining. Mountain hut behind us was oddly closed. Lack of skiers I suppose.

We made it back staying shockingly dry. I think it helped that the kids basically ran down the whole mountain. All they wanted to do was to go explore in the forrest by our place and play on the playground. Dan and Max ran to the store for supplies while I watched the other two play by the river. Luckily Dan did not buy this massive chunk of cheese, just used Max for scale.

He did buy the most flowered shaped lettuce ever though. The stalk below was so small and the leaves all fanned out perfectly.

Cooking dinner was a family affair to get it going quickly. We were hungry and we sort of lost track of time.

Lots of reading after dinner, quick bedtime and parents stayed up working.

The next day I had grand plans for a hike I found online. Drive there was beautiful, up through a valley to a town called Jaun.

The hike was called Gastlosen Tour and it was a loop once you got up to the first level of the mountains. The internet suggested taking the ski lift up to save the legs as the rest of the hike had quite a bit of elevation gain. We got there no problem, but soon found out that the ski lift was not working (no big deal) and that the mountain had a lot of snow towards the top…and we couldn’t even see the top. AKA…we weren’t doing this hike. After some stress of getting the online parking payment to work, Dan mapped us out a route and we started out along the river.

Then we turned up the mountain and started what would be a non-stop mud hike. Not Welsh level mud, but just wet.

Sam found a stream that he insisted I take a photo for Grandma McConnell because ‘it looks like something she would like to paint.’

Even got warm enough to take off out big jackets. Not so much the temperature was high, but that we were walking straight up a ski mountain.

Views to the valley below.

We rounded a corner and all of a sudden, there was snow all over the trail! Pretty deep too, not just a bit here and there. We had climbed quite a bit and decided to call this the ’top’. We found a good place to sit and have lunch. Kids were struggling to sit and eat, wanting to explore now that we weren’t hiking and asking them to put down the 10 sticks and 17 rocks they were trying to pick up.

It started to rain as we were eating and Dan and I were getting pretty cold. We held on as long as we could, so the kids could do their exploring, but finally had to head down the mountain. We may have bribed them a bit with some Swiss Oreos.

We took the ‘shortcut’ down the mountain, meaning we walked more or less right down the ski slope. It was fast, as for most of it, the kids were running down and screaming their heads off.

We were kind of a muddy mess by the time we got back to the car, so we made the kids strip their pants and shoes. They had to put them right back on, as I wanted to check out the waterfall in town that was about a 4 minute drive. But we have learned, kids can’t NOT kick the seat, especially when they have muddy shoes. We parked and walked across a bridge to get a close up of the waterfall.

Not huge, but with the amount of water and a bit of wind, we got lots of spray. Ben tried to eat it…

…and Sam enjoyed the wind in his hair.

Drive back to our place and the kids wanted to keep playing. I wasn’t feeling well, so Max read in bed with me while I attempted to pass out. Eventually we rose from bed and he joined his brothers doing some wood stuff. Always a plan that I never seem privy to.

The restaurant below us had a small kid area and that seemed like the best idea for feeding ourselves that evening. I couldn’t shake my upset stomach, but braved it and had soup for dinner. Dan and I had a few moments of peace and (not) quiet…as we could still hear the kids behind us.

We had a lot planned for the next day, starting with a cheese tour at 8:40am. We ate, packed up and got to the factory right on time, only to find out that the tour (which we later found out was not really a tour, more of a self guided thing) was at 11:20am. We decided to walk to Gruyeres and check out the castle and a bar that my friend Colin had recommended. It was about a 15 minute walk up a hill where the cutest little town was perched a top.

And we love us some old city walls.

Streets were adorable, houses were very well kept up, just too cute.

Super small town, with one ‘main’ thoroughfare. We were there a little after 9am and nothing opened until 10am, yet we had to leave around 10:45am to get back for the cheese tour, or so we thought. We strolled the main street, kids looked in the windows of shops at Swiss Army Knives. Ben has been asking about one for quite sometime now. Well, he’s been asking to get a pocket knife for widdling sticks and for camping. Dan and I agreed he was ready and Switzerland, if you are going to get one, was the perfect place. We looked and told him we’d come back when the shop opened. More strolling of the 300meter long street and we found a water fountain.

Up a bit more, we found a museum and a bar that were designed by the guy who designed the stuff from the Alien movies. Don’t quote me on this exactly, but Colin had recommended it, as it was just so weird. Not open until 10am, but a few things to check out outside. I have never seen the movie (I get scared really easily) but I cam imagine that this is what some of the aliens looked like.

At the end of the town, we came to the castle.

Surprise surprise, it wasn’t open yet, but we were able to walk a bit around it.

We looped around to some lower newer looking walls.

And at the bottom of the trail, we found a park. We had 20 minutes until everything opened, so we set the kids loose. Dan’s turn to try to reach static equilibrium with the kids.

We walked the back way to town, passing more and more cute houses with lively gardens.

We decided our first stop of the 10am places, should be the alien bar. Not the real name, but we’ll just call it that. Dan and I got cappuccinos (it was 10am!) and the kids had fun checking out all gross things in there…with lots of questions about the movie of course.

To be honest, it was really cool. The ceiling seemed like a M. C. Escher drawing.

We more or less chugged our coffees and went to a shop to look at Swiss Army Knives. Ben isn’t the fastest decider, so it was clear this was going to take a LONG time. He needed to look at every single one and weigh the pros and cons of what each had, and what it didn’t. We did limit him in size to about one that had 10 things, not counting the toothpick and the tweezers. I also said no to the one with the fish scaler. Stainless steel or not, you would never get fish gut smell out of that thing. He finally decided, Dan stayed to pay and the kids and I started to walk back to La Maison du Gruyère (the cheese factory).

We got tickets and were given cheese samples. The same cheese, but each with different ages. We agreed they tasted differently, but I couldn’t tell which were aged longer. Basically, they were all good.

So the tour we found out, was that they put in the rennet at 11:20am and you could watch the process from above. We all had audio guides, but we skipped the first few to get to the viewing area. There were 4 large vats, 2400 liters each and we had a clear view from above.

Not sure if we actually saw the rennet go in, but we saw the consistency of the liquid change. Beyond the vats, you could see the cheese wheel casts that they pump the liquid cheese (not real name, just what I’m calling it) and then get pressurized with the whey seeping out. We were watching, but not close enough. All of a sudden, I noticed the liquid cheese level in one of the vats was lowering. We raced to the opposite side to see it coming out of 12 spigots into funnels at the top of the 12 cheese wheels on the opposite side.

The cheese wheels were 12 on top and 12 on bottom on a giant axle that allowed them to rotate. Not sure if they were rotated regularly, or was able to rotate to fill them up. Surprisingly, it was very fun to watch the liquid cheese fil up the cheese wheels. We kept watching when all of a sudden whole axle started to rotate and then came crashing forward with a worker jumping back so quickly to avoid getting burning hot liquid cheese.

It all happened so fast, we were unsure of what had just happened. We knew it should NOT have happened, but liquid cheese just kept pouring out over the top of the funnels onto the floor. No emergency shut off, or maybe it was better to have hardening cheese on the floor than in the giant vat. Either way it was a mess. No one was really doing anything, just sort of waiting for it to finish draining out. It looked like the only reason it didn’t rotate 180d degrees was that the spigots caught the top of the funnels and stopped it. The look on a woman’s face when she walked onto the floor showed clearly that this did NOT happen often!

Our assumption was that someone forgot to lock the shaft. Dan said, “hey kids, let’s wait 20 minutes for the manager to drive in and see what happens (see who gets fired).” Indeed, about 15 minutes later the boss walks in, looks around, tries to fiddle with the controls to no avail, and goes outside to make the kind of call you don’t want to have to make when you’re the boss. Dan also noticed that the control panel was open before all this happened, meaning things didn’t always work great. If you didn’t know, Dan used to program machines in all different factories as his first job out of college. He claims to have made the world’s biggest altoid. When they were still doing tests on the machines, and the products was not edible, he padded it all together to make a giant one. About the size of a hockey puck.

Knowing not much more was going to happen, except a lot of clean up, we did the rest of our self guided tour. It was small and feeling as we already had the excitement of the day, we didn’t stay to long. Just enough to learn a bit about making cheese. We then had little snack outside before heading back to Lausanne.

Fast drive to our new AirBnb. Ben checked out his knife the whole way with his brothers drooling over his shoulders. Dan dropped me and the kids off at our new Airbnb and retured the car. It was a perfect, easy weekend.