Saturday 6/18 -I

2 hours of hiking!

I didn't go running today, but I think the hike I went on definitely counts as exercise- my legs are really sore right now (not as sore as it sounds like Katie's are though!) I went on the hike with my friend and his brother, and they are intense hikers. The hike was supposed to take three hours but we finished it in two because we were going so fast. I struggled to keep up, but it was still a lot of fun.

The place we went was called La Dôle, which is in the Swiss Jura mountain range. We took a train (several, actually) to get there, which took about an hour. We saw lots of cows and some ski lifts (not running, of course). The hike was really steep and slippery, and our goal was a big meteorological tower thing at the top of La Dôle. We didn't take any pictures ourselves, but it looks like this:

The view from there usually looks like this:
But it was really foggy when we got to the top so the view looked more like this:After we hiked back down, our train wasn't going to come for an hour, so we decided to try to hitchhike to another train station. None of us had ever hitchhiked before, so we didn't know whether it would work. My friend's brother tried to convince us that we needed a "hitchhiking license" to hitchhike in Switzerland (False! I looked it up when I got home).

We stood on the side of the little country road and stuck our thumbs out whenever a car drove by. In the next ten minutes, about ten cars passed us without stopping, although one old man with a full car made an apologetic gesture. Then a car finally stopped for us! A French man and a little kid were in the car, and he agreed to drive us to St. Cergue- another train station.

It was awkwardly silent in the car. The radio was playing "Grenade," but I stopped myself from singing along. I would have talked to the driver but I wasn't confident enough in my French. I did talk in French to the kid though- his name was Morgan and he was two years old. I'm glad my French skills are at least up to two-year-old level!

We got out of the car about 10 minutes later, thanked the man, and walked away proudly. Then we looked at the train schedule and realized that the next train was the same train that we would have gotten on from the station we were originally at. Still, we were thrilled that we had successfully hitchhiked for the first time.