We spent the night in Chur after Gabrielle and Jerry met us at the train station. And the next morning, we looked out the window at the neat, clean cobblestone streets where the only people to be seen were people going from some place to another on some kind of purposeful visit — quite a contrast with the chaotic streets of Rome.
We had a breakfast of meats and cheeses served on a wooden platter. Trudy and I stashed our suitcases in lockers at the train station leaving only enough in our backpacks for our two day hike. Then we caught a train to Bad Ragaz where we caught a postal bus up into the mountains.
The bright yellow bus wound its way up switch-backing roads, thru little towns, beeping its three-toned horn each time it approached a blind turn. The road climbed up a narrow valley until it stopped in a small parking lot beside a large dam that made the Gigerwaldsee.
From there, we started walking further up the valley on a paved one-lane road that wound along cliffs beside the lake. The mountains beside us were capped with clouds, although the sun would sometimes poke thru, illuminating the forest that clung to the rock.
And the mountains in the distance would sometimes frown down on us from frigid heights were snow had fallen just the night before.
We followed the narrow road as is wound along, sometimes tunneling thru otherwise impassable arms of the mountains that jutted out into the valley. We walked at a leisurely pace until we came to St. Martins at the end of the lake. (You can follow that part of our hike on a video that someone else made during the summer a few years ago.)
There, we stopped and had some lunch. It hadn’t been a difficult hike by any means, but we were going to want food in us for the rest of the hike ahead of us.
After getting warm and with full bellies, we walked to where the wanderweg signs pointed up into the mountains. Gabrielle and Jerry showed us the route we would be following on a map beside the road where a foot path left the road and disappeared into the forest.
And then we began our hike in earnest.