April Alpine Adventure - Part 1: Tour of the Teutonic Satellites

A couple of weeks ago I happened to see my Slovenian friend Peter online and so I decided to say hello. We chatted briefly and then he asked me if I wanted to go Switzerland that next week with him and another Slovenian friend. I didn't need long to think about it, my courses for that week were canceled and so I had the time. They would travel cheap. Why not?

My decision was made even easier by the main destination: The Bern Temple.

So that next Monday, the 26th of April, I found myself at the train station with my luggage boarding a train to Rosenheim an hour south of Munich.

After arriving in Rosenheim the timing was near perfect with me getting off the train and Peter and Matjaž arriving by car from Slovenia.

We loaded up in the car again and set off southwards towards the Alps.

It was raining a bit and rather cloudy, but who knows what might happen along the way?

Sure enough we made our first stop in the town of Hall in Tirol (not far from Innsbruck) and the clouds parted and we had sun!

Hall had a wonderfully preserved old town:

Here's Matjaž and I (I'm taking the very picture you see above in the picture below)...

The inside of the church was quite impressive:

There was even a glass tomb with a real skeleton inside:

We wandered the streets a bit more:

...and then ate some Slovenian pastries, brought from Ljubljana, while enjoying the sun.


No sooner had we got back in the car than it started to rain heavily again.

We drove for a few hours through the Inn Valley of Austria with high mountains veiled by clouds on both sides. There were many tunnels.

Then the rain started to clear fast as we reached the furthest reaches of the Austrian Empire.

We made a brief stop in the town of Feldkirch just before the Austrian border.

We got back in the car and drove a few minutes until we found ourselves at the border of a new land...

We had come to Liechtenstein!

This principality is one of the smallest countries in the world. A few little-known facts about Liechtenstein:

-It is doubly landlocked (meaning it has no coast and neither do any of its neighbors, Switzerland and Austria).

-It has the highest gross domestic product of any country in the world.

-It is the only Alpine country located entirely in the Alps.

-It is the only German-speaking country that does not border Germany.

-It is the world's largest producer of sausage casings, potassium storage units and false teeth.

-It has no military and only about 85 police officers. The last murder took place "about ten years ago," according to one officer.

-It has no airport and even though high-speed trains pass through the country from Austria to Switzerland, they do not bother to stop in Liechtenstein.



The border patrol is managed by the Swiss. We stopped and they checked our passports speaking the funny Swiss German dialect.

And we were on our way!

Truth be told, there isn't a lot to see in Liechtenstein, and it wasn't much different from Austria or Switzerland.

However, it's always fun to be in a new country and this was number 35 on my list.

Our one and only stop in Liechtenstein was in the capital city of Vaduz. There we drove up to the Prince's Castle on the mountainside...

First we got a look from below at a small vineyard...

We drove up and parked behind the castle. The mountains in the distance were Swiss...

The Prince and his family still live in this castle and it is not open for visitors. We got a glimpse in the courtyard...

It was fun wandering around the royal premises in the spring weather...

**SPECIAL BEHIND THE SCENES**

Taking the photo you just saw:

There was also a nice view of Vaduz... the sprawling metropolis...

**SPECIAL BEHIND THE SCENES**

Of course I had to get my rock from Liechtenstein...

We took one last view of the castle as we drove away and on to Switzerland...

We crossed the Rhine and entered Switzerland and a few moments later we came upon one of the most beautiful lakes in Switzerland, Walensee (Lac de Walenstadt in French).

This lake was known to me from a piano piece written by the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt. In the 1830's he took a trip through Switzerland and Italy and thereafter wrote several sets of pieces known as "Années de pèlerinage" or "Years of Pilgrimage."

The piece is beautiful and foreshadows the impressionism of Debussy by over half a century.

Here is the piece set to some of the photos I took. You don't have to watch it, but I do suggest you listen.

Here are some higher-quality versions of some of those pictures...

Peter and I in the water...

Matjaž was the first Slovenian to serve an LDS mission. He served in Utah. Here we are in the lake...

We drove on through Switzerland passing towering massifs of snow-capped Alps and eventually made it to our final destination for the day: Zollikofen.

This is a small town near Bern where the LDS temple is located...

We checked into the temple hostel and got a room with six bunks between the three of us...

It had a been a long but fun and beautiful day. Here's a map of our route for the day with each of our stops marked...

View April Alpine Adventure - Day 1 in a larger map

I went to bed tired but with a lot to look forward to. As I had glimpsed earlier that day, Switzerland has a lot to offer...

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