Basically a zero hiking day. Yesterday was tough, today the weather is worse, so no high pass for us. Instead a day trip to nearby Thun on the lake, and a pleasant lunch.
As we left Griesalp on the 8:40 post bus down the hill, we saw two very moist men straggling out of the forest. It had been drizzling all night, just above freezing, and they looked pretty beat up. They were camping and hiking, and happy to be out of the rain. We were pretty damn happy we had a warm room, and VodkaMan provided a lot of dinner entertainment.
The "most famous post bus in all Switzerland" took us down the hairpins to the train station, and some 40 minutes later we got off at the Thun main train station. We had done some tiny research--a castle! On a lake! A restaurant on the lake! but not much else, though Chris tried to wow me by saying "Thun is Switzerland's 11th largest city". Wow, that's enough to visit.
Thun was, well, one of those orderly pleasant cities, a market town for 800 years or whatnot, marked by a big old medieval castle that's now the city museum. We made our way across the river with its swans and ducks and trout-like fish, and up the hill.
I was pleasantly surprised how Thun Castle presented the town and ancient old artifacts--the city's execution sword, 500 year old stained glass of some beefy bearded dude, the old main room from the 1200s, an old Roman mile post that sometime in the 400s or later was made into a church column. You know where the post was from because it was written on the mile post, of course, and of course we still use Roman characters today, 1800 years later. Good views towards the lake and the cloudy mountains.
Some rambling around town (I'd lost my contact case but got a free one at some optometry store in the Migros center) and then to the restaurant at the lake. A cool but pleasant lunch of venison (yum) then back up to our next hotel in Kandersteg, a town that doesn't have much but a few large hotels that look very tour-bus centric from the outside.
Dinner was wandering through the cold rain into town, pizza at a little dive bar. Back to the room. Even rainier/snowier tomorrow, so another take-it-easy-day.