July 18th, 1998
| We woke up and gathered our dried clothes and had breakfast at the hotel. The hotel then had someone carry our luggage and Arnie and I in a little minivan to the train station. This was very nice, since it would have been uphill to carry our luggage. |
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 We worked hard for this train ticket | We had another close call changing trains. We had 15 minutes to change but it took quite a while to buy tickets. Some of the trains we had to buy tickets because they would not accept our Europasses. It was kind of interesting when we made our close call as we went to get on the train, the ladies and Jonathon were ready with the luggage to get on the train. But it was a second class compartment. They didn't know which class we were going to buy. We had typically been buying first class tickets. |
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| So we asked the conductor who was standing right there, where the first class compartment was. Without even looking at our tickets, he said, "Oh, you don't have first class tickets." We showed him our tickets and he agreed that we indeed had first class tickets and we were on our way. This train completed our journey to Grindelwald. |
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 | I'm not sure if this was normal or not but it seemed to be really hot for being in the mountains. We made our warm journey to where we were going to stay at Hotel Eiger. The outside of the hotel was very plain and even somewhat ugly. The lobby was alright but a bit small. The elevator was quite small with an unusual way of operating. You would open the door like any regular door and walk in. There was no other set of doors inside. So when you were in transit, you could see the doors from the other floors passing by you. I knew that this was going to be our most expensive place and I was less than impressed so far. |
| That all changed when we entered our adjoining suites. They were very lavish and had new woodwork and fixtures. The Ytreeide's room had a jet tub and poster bed with about 20 little lights over the bed that could dim for a romantic setting. The rooms were very spacious. |
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 | The best part was walking out on the small balcony. It overlooked the beautiful mountains. We were on the 5th and top floor and the view was absolutely breathtaking. |
| Arnie called Andy from our balcony and had a nice little chat with him and tried to explain the beautiful view. We looked at different shops around town and checked on and bought our tickets for the gondola ride. After we bought our tickets we realized that by showing our Europasses, we could get a 25% discount. |
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 | The only problem was that we didn't have them with us. This was the only place we felt comfortable leaving our money belt in the hotel because of the area and because our rooms hade safes. So us guys ran down to our room, got our Europasses and went back up to the ticket counter to get our partial refund. We had to hurry because we had reservations for dinner in a half-hour. |
We had dinner at the restaurant at our hotel. All six of us had Fondu. It was a lot of fun. Afterwards, we went up to our room and sat on our balcony and enjoyed the wonderful view. We didn't have much of a chance to ever get a picture of all six of us together because we didn't feel very comfortable giving our camera to someone else to take our picture. We decided that we could get a picture of all of us and our great view by putting the camera on a table just inside the room. This one turned out to be one of my favorite pictures. Later we played rook in our room. Fun was had by all. Guess who won!!
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