Day 9 Leuk & Gemmi Alp

We did a little butter making today. We learned that the butter churn & molds are soaked in water for 2 days to tighten the joints, and you only fill the churn half way because the cream will expand as churned.

Boy it took a long time to churn! Us amateurs were very sloppy.

The butter molds

Our pretty finished butter. (It was very tasty! We had it on our sourdough bread we made.)

We then took a hike up the this ravine. Most of the trail was on these catwalks. Some spots were a little scary. It was a pretty awesome hike.
As we were coming back from our hike our guide pointed out where we would be staying that night, if you look real close on the top of that mountain you can see the hotel up there. you could either take a several hour hike up to it or a gondola. We wished we would have hiked it, you could see the trail from the gondola and it looked pretty amazing.
Our hotel room slept 20, quite an interesting arrangement and because you pay by the bed and there was only 16 of us we had 3 more men join our room. There was a Sheep festival the next day so everything was booked up. Needless to say nobody slept well that night.
The view from our room and for that fact, anywhere in the hotel was amazing So that made up for the awkward sleeping arrangements. In the center of the mountain line is the Matterhorn.
This is a view from the Hotel looking down on the town of Leuk. This is where we would have hiked up. Amazing, right?
This is the backside of the hotel, down by the lake is where they will have the sheep festival. I will tell you more on that on Day 11.
Here is all of us at dinner, we are at the back on the left. The nice guys that are sharing our room took multiple pictures for all of us.

The beauty of this country is amazing! (I think I keep repeating myself.)

Day 8 Loetschental valley

I just thought this was a good picture of an old slate roof.

OK now for a little history lesson. In the 1930's a dentist, Weston A. Price started studying groups of people all over the world that had not been introduced to modernized foods. He studied their traditional diets and the effects on their teeth, facial structure, & health. He also observed the changes when people started consuming the modern foods, white flour, sugar, & processed foods. There has been a foundation set up in his name that studies and promotes the traditional diets. That is the group we went with on this trip.

Well one of the places Weston Price went was here in the Loetschental valley, there are 3 little towns along this valley. We took a bus all the way to the end of the valley. We then took a short hike up to this small glacier lake.
We then hiked all the way back down the valley on the same path that Weston Price took about 80 years earlier. There is an old picture he took of children by this rock. So we took a group photo here.
Here is the first little village. This is probably a summer village for when they bring the cows up. As you can see it was a beautiful hike.

We hiked about 9 miles this day.

Along the way we found wild blueberries and strawberries. They were so good.

We hiked on down to the third little town and had lunch on the balcony, taking in the beautiful view. This is the only place where we saw Edelweiss, they had it in planters. It was pretty and it smelled very good.
We then went to a small local museum. They had a room full of masks that were used in ceremonies to scare off the winter spirits and bring on spring. This one was really creepy!

One of these masks is not like the others....

Just one of the many awesome views, wouldn't you just love to live here?

This little church was pictured in Dr. Price's book (Nutrition & Physical Degeneration) but with not as many buildings around it.

What a lovely day!

Day 7 Vevey & Chateau de Chillon

Today we took a long train ride to the city of Vevey on the Lake Geneva. We walked along the lake to a museum on food. There was this fork sculpture in the lake....

so we had a little fun with it.

I thought this was real interesting, how much our food has changed in a hundred years.

We took a boat ride on the lake. France is behind us in the picture, one day we will go there.
The boat took us to Chateau de Chillon. The oldest written date of the castle was 1150. Of course it has been added to along the years.
Look at the size of this fireplace! There was one this size in just about every room. Even then they liked their kitchens big.

This is the view from the Keep, the tallest tower of the castle. It is the refuge tower, store house, powder house, defense observation post & provisional residence.

For safety reasons the door of the Keep, which is high from the ground, was only accessible with the aid of a ladder or drawbridge.

Looking up at the Keep.

The Moat, this castle is built on a natural rock Island. In fact you can see the rocks that they built around in the basement/dungeon.