| Hiking
through the Sihl Valley |
| Hirzel
to Menzingen, Switzerland (June, 2007) |
|
| On
a perfect Sunday morning, eighty degrees with a slight
breeze and hardly a cloud in the sky, Irmi and I drove |
| twenty minutes to the small
village of Hirzel, in the Sihl Valley,
roughly halfway between Lake Zurich and Lake Zug. |
|
| There,
we joined our friends, Ernst and Maya, and their sister-in-law, Astrid, on a four-hour hike
to Menzingen and |
| back;
plodding in deep forest; across a wooden foot bridge spanning the Sihl
River; through tunnels carved out of |
| rock
abutting the river bank; and finally into a broad meadow leading to the
locally renowned Restaurant Sihlmatt. |
|
| Restaurant
Sihlmatt (http://www.sihlmatt.ch)
is renowned for its fresh, locally grown, fried Rainbow Trout, and the |
| others
all insisted on dropping in for lunch. If you are European and a
fish-lover, all is well and good; however, if |
| you
are the lone American in attendance, and you cannot eat something spayed
on a plate, cooked in its full skin, |
| staring
up at you with a beady burnt eyeball, then it is not so great.
Yours truly ordered swine schnitzel and beer. |
|
| There
is an old axiom I learned in the Army on "forced road marches."
It goes like this: for every downhill stretch |
| of
trail, there is an uphill climb waiting just around the corner -- of an
even longer and steeper grade. After lunch, |
| we
set out again, and, sure enough, an endless curving incline helped to
sweat out all that beer I had just enjoyed. |
|
| Ernst,
our tour guide, had anticipated this and planned the route accordingly.
After finally cresting the hill, a small |
| cluster
of buildings loomed ahead at a sharp bend in the road where a shaded
outdoor garden cafe lay partially |
| hidden
behind a low stone wall. There, we quenched our renewed thirst and
lolled about for the better part of half |
| an
hour, regaling one another with tales from the past shared with
other friends in other various and exotic locales. |
|
| Trudging
on, we covered another few kilometers and arrived back at the starting
point -- Ernst and Maya's small |
| farm
-- where we drank coffee at an old wooden table on a broad terrace and
stared across the valley in silence, |
| contemplating
a picture-perfect end to a warm and sunny Sunday in June among the
rolling hills of the lower Alps. |
| |
