Thun - Thunersee und Brienzersee

Today was awful. It rained all night and it was still raining at breakfast. All the options I'd planned for Thun involved decent weather, and today "indecent" was grossly optimistic. Rather than sit in our room all day, we paid to sit on boats. Normally there would be spectacular mountain views on both sides of the lake, but not today. Keine Berge. No mountains. At least we were dry.

The first Schiff was the MS Berner Oberland. She took us from Thun to Interlaken, across the Thunersee. The upper deck is first class. We had second class tickets.

We then jumped on a train from one side of Interlaken to the other to catch the Dampfschiff on the Brienzersee. DS Lotschberg is a 99-year-old paddle steamer. Quite noisy, but the main shaft drive was open to watch, and generated a lot of welcome warmth from the steam driving it. Also found some pretty flowers as we hopped onto the boat.

Twenty minutes turnaround time in Brienz, and back we came. And yes - it was still raining.

We jumped on a train again, and we had almost an hour to wait for the boat to take us home. We grabbed some takeaway as meals on the boats are very expensive. The MS Stadt Thun was smaller than both of the other boats, but the crew on this ship were great - happy to talk to us, asking and answering questions, helping our language learning. The rain stopped about 10 minutes before we landed in Thun.

This was our view for about 15 minutes.

We passed the DS Blumlisalp coming into Spiez. She's the paddlesteamer that runs on the Thunersee.

We disembarked around 8.20pm. Seeing it wasn't raining, we walked through Thun to the Schloss (palace) for a quick squiz. We found another covered bridge on the way.

It was raining again walking back to our place (naturally). A quick photo of the building we're staying in. We have three windows on the fourth floor (second from the top). Our lights are on, and I'm hanging out one of the windows with my scarf dangling.

Got a new bird, today. Well...two, actually - but it was impossible to get a photo of the Crag Martin. I got a nice shot of the Red-crested Pochard, though.