The Secrets to Good Hot Chocolate and The Return of Adventure Girl

Ah, so we've finally figured out what makes Swiss hot chocolate so yummy. First of all, it must be made with milk, never water. And the secret ingredient..... you add a little square of swiss chocolate, a bit larger than a postage stamp, to the bottom of your mug and stir until it is melted. It makes the cocoa richer and sweeter. And, if you're feeling really adventurous, you can try flavored chocolates, like mint chocolate of toffee chocolate - it gives an extra little kick. Yummy!

And now for the return of Adventure Girl... as you know, we arrived in Zermatt to the rain. It continued to rain all evening. Before we went to sleep, I said to Eric that if it was raining in the morning, I didn't want to go hiking. His response was, "What? Where's the Adventure Girl that I married." He was just playing when he said this. But I thought about it, and after all we did hike Mt. Fuji in the rain at night, no less, and a much higher altitude, so this couldn't be so bad....could it?

Well, of course it was raining buckets this morning. But we decided that we were here, and we had to at least try to go hiking. So we bundled up in all our layers (which was most of the clothes I brought) and headed for the mountain. We took a furnicular train car through a tunnel up the mountain, and arrived up top 6 minutes later. (This was not on top of the Matterhorn or anywhere near it. It was to the top of the area where we were going to hike.) When we walked out of the tunnel, it was raining even more than when we started.

Have you ever had an umbrella that got so wet it stopped repelling water? Have you ever had a water proof jacket get so wet that it stopped repelling water? Are you getting the picture? Despite the cold rain, we had a fun time and laughed the whole way down the mountain. The trail was beautiful - on top of fallen pine needles (oh the fragrance was heavenly!) Unfortunately, the pines were a bit skimpy and didn't help to shelter us much from the rain. But there was one brief moment, where the haze disappated the tiniest amount and we think we saw part of the Matterhorn (and as far as we're concerned, that counts!) :-)

I have to emphasie that we truly had fun on this adventure, and even though the mountain blasted freezing cold wind at us, and dumped gallons of water on our heads, we couldn't stop laughing because it was just silly fun. (And it's even easier to laugh about now that we are warm and dry.)

So tomorrow we leave Switzerland very early and head to Italy. I can't believe that the Swiss portion of our trip is drawing to a close. We've loved it here, and we've learned so much about how we would travel here next time. For example, I think we would come later in the summer to have better weather, and we would definitely bring more layers of clothing (although, you know the problem with layers, once they get wet, it doesn't matter how much you have on!)

We will have about an 8 hour travel day tomorrow to get to Cinque Terre. But we are stopping in Milan for lunch (hee hee - do you like how that sounds?) and to see the Duomo (no, not the Duomo from Florence, but the one in Milan). And then we have to make a couple of different train transfers to get to the coast. Ah Cinque Terre.... and hopefully more adventures to come.