MY NEW TRAVEL CONSULTING BUSINESS: "TRADE HOMES AND TRAVEL"

            There are all sorts of questions about house exchanging, and I bet I’ve been asked every one of them in my workshops, in response to my articles, or in simple conversations with friends and acquaintances.  There is huge interest in home swapping and many people are taking the plunge.  Many more are willing to give it a try but their busy schedules make it difficult for them to tackle the process of finding a good exchange and organizing it.  Other people feel a bit overwhelmed or even intimidated by the process, but would love to do an exchange if someone could help them.

             That’s why I’ve decided to offer my help in organizing house exchanges for people who need some assistance.  Through my new consulting business, “Trade Homes And Travel,” I can help you:

·         Find the home swap website(s) that work best for you and that offer the widest selection of potential exchanges in places you want to go.

·         Write a compelling and catchy description of your home and neighborhood to help maximize your chances of being noticed by people browsing the site(s).

·         Select the best photos to showcase your home and area.

·         Choose a home swap locale among the thousands that are available.

·         Write a strong query that will catch the eye of other home swappers.

·         Negotiate the details of the exchange.

·         Negotiate pet, garden or houseplant care.

·         Protect your home and its contents while you’re gone.

·         Walk through the checklist of tasks to be done before embarking on the exchange.

 Over the past decade, my family and I have done nearly 30 exchanges to cities, suburban areas, small towns and the countryside.  We’ve traveled around Europe and Scandinavia exchanging homes.   We’ve swapped to Costa Rica and Canada as well as throughout the United States.  We’ve stayed in luxurious second homes and cosy family houses; hip downtown apartments and cabins in the mountains; beachfront properties and ski resort condos. 

       House exchanging is now my preferred way to travel, and I’d like to help you learn to enjoy it, too.  If you’d like to contact me about helping you find a great home swap, email me at bamcoast@earthlink.net.  Happy swapping!

MY NEW COLUMN IN "REAL FAMILY TRAVEL MAGAZINE"

Greetings, house exchange friends!  I have exciting news. Beginning in June, I will be a columnist with a new web publication, "Real Family Travel Magazine."  I'll be a regular contributor on house exchanging and the kinds of interesting family destinations that exchanging can lead to. The magazine features stories, articles, videos and tips from real families who travel.  It includes stories about travel in the United States and internationally.  Here's the May 2013 edition:

 



 

 

The magazine writes about all kinds of travel.  The December 2012 issue covered everything from German holiday markets to volunteering in Asia:  

 

"We're zig-zagging the planet again!  We've got articles about Vienna, New Zealand, Germany, Santa Fe, and Honduras.  You'll be inspired by one family's trip to Southeast Asia to volunteer with their daughter who is in a wheelchair. Jenn Miller will encourage you to consider what it really means when you leave it all to gravel.  We also have some great tips about flying as a family . . . and hopefully it will take away some of the anxiety air travel brings."

 

 

 

My first column appears next month, June 2014.  I'm looking forward to being part of this fabulous travel publication!  Take a look at the magazine at http://realfamilytravel.com/

ANOTHER HOUSE EXCHANGE WORKSHOP ON MARCH 16!

          I’m excited to announce that I’ll be holding my THIRD house exchange workshop on Sunday, March 16, from 2:00 to 4:00 PM.  The venue is once again the historic Hill Center on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC.  My previous two house exchange workshops SOLD OUT, with waiting lists. The Lincoln Room holds 100 participants, but the last two workshops were Standing Room Only, so register early!

            To register for the March 16 workshop: http://hillcenterdc.org/home/programs/1402

            The Hill Center has a storied history dating back to 1864, when President Abraham Lincoln commissioned the construction of the nation’s first naval hospital to care for vets wounded in the Civil War.  By the time the building was finished in 1866, Lincoln was dead and the war was over.  The 50-bed facility’s first patient was a 24-year-old African American seaman, Benjamin Drummond.
       

 

            Now, nearly 150 years later, the Old Naval Hospital has undergone a $10 million renovation, bringing the structure back to its original glorious appearance, re-painted in its original colors and surrounded by an impressive wrought-iron fence.  The renovation also incorporated many state-of-the-art designs, including a “green footprint” and a heating and cooling system supported by 32 geothermal wells.

             The Hill Center is described in its website, www.hillcenterdc.org, as “a landmark of the Capitol Hill neighborhood, a vibrant, campus-like hub for cultural enrichment, lifelong learning, and civic engagement.”  I can attest that the Hill Center is a beautiful location, with many interesting programs, and I’m very pleased to be offering my next house exchange workshop there.

             Put Sunday, March 16, on your calendars!  I hope to see you there!

HOUSE EXCHANGES: A NEW WAY TO TRAVEL

  

 St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, Spring Break

 

 Reprinted below are excerpts from my most recent article on house exchanging, which appeared in the January 2014 Washington, DC monthly magazine, The Hill Rag.  For the complete article, go to

http://www.capitalcommunitynews.com/content/house-exchanges-new-way-travel

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The last time you went on vacation, you left behind something that could have saved you thousands of dollars:  your home. Why let your house, apartment or condo sit empty when you can swap it for someone else’s?  Home exchanging is an increasingly popular way to save money and experience more authentic travel.  Instead of paying for cookie-cutter hotels and endless restaurant meals, house exchanging lets you relax in a comfortable residence and cook in a fully equipped kitchen.   It puts you into real neighborhoods where you can live like a local and discover off-the-beaten-track locations few tourists ever see.  For the past decade, my family and I have exchanged our modest Capitol Hill rowhouse for homes in the U.S. and abroad.  House exchanging has given us cash in our pockets and a front-row seat on the world.

            By swapping our home with others, we’ve had memorable spring breaks, summer vacations, Thanksgiving getaways and winter holidays.  We’ve stayed in downtown London and Copenhagen; relaxed on the beaches of Costa Rica, Florida, and the Virgin Islands; hiked around Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks; and discovered history on Normandy’s D-Day beaches and Rome’s ancient ruins.  We’ve explored Oregon’s tidepools and walked Boston’s “Freedom Trail;” lingered over mussels and beers in Belgian restaurants and hiked in Germany’s fabled Black Forest.  We’ve done 24 exchanges, including the trip of a lifetime in 2011 when we took our son out of school, negotiated leaves of absences from our jobs, and traveled around Europe for four months, doing house exchanges along the way.  Home swapping has let us see the world from the comfort of someone else’s living room.

 

Swiss Alps, Summer Vacation

In the United States and around the globe, house exchanging is a growing practice.  The websites offer thousands of listings in more than 100 countries.  Home swapping is a truly global phenomena that cuts across age, race and gender lines.  And you don’t have to be rich or even a home-owner to do an exchange:  while there are some places with drop-dead views or infinity pools, there are many apartments and modest homes that provide a great base for travel.  

There are a few things you need to know to be a successful house exchanger.  First and foremost, you must be trusting.  A complete stranger will use your home, unsupervised, while you are far away.  You have to be comfortable with strangers rummaging around your kitchen cupboards, snoozing under your covers and eating at your table.  You have to think of yourself as The Three Bears minus the “who’s-been-sleeping-in-my-bed?” outburst because after all, this time you invited Goldilocks in.

You also need to be fairly well organized.  If you’re the kind of person daunted by planning a weekend getaway, or who thinks summer vacations are more trouble than they’re worth, you probably shouldn’t consider house exchanging.  There’s no hotel concierge to book your theater tickets or hail a cab: what you do and how you get there is entirely up to you, which is, of course, half the fun. 

Here are some of the most commonly asked questions about house exchanging:

1.       How does it work?  Home swapping works through websites, of which there are several, including  www.homeforexchange.com, www.homeexchange.com, and www.home-exchange-usa.com.

2.      Is it safe?  House exchanging is a trust-based exercise, so there’s no way to make it totally fool-proof.  There are basic steps you can take to increase your security, including removing valuables from your home and using travel boards to evaluate a prospective house exchange neighborhood.

3.      Who is a typical house exchanger?  Everybody!  Young and old, single and married, people with young kids, no kids, or grown kids, straight and gay, and all colors. 

4.      Do you have to do a simultaneous exchange?  You can do either a simultaneous exchange (you both travel to each other’s homes at the same time) or a non-simultaneous exchange (one person travels to the exchange house while the other travels at a later date.) 

5.      What do you do about pets?  See if your house exchange partner would be willing to care for your pet, and indicate if you're willing to care for others' pets.

6.      Do you meet house exchange partners in advance?  Typically, you drop your house keys in the mail or leave them in an agreed-upon location and head out the door before your exchange partner arrives. 

7.      What do you do if you get a dump?  Out of 24 exchanges in 13 different countries, I’ve only crossed the line into a true “dump” situation once, and even it had its redeeming characteristics. 

8.      How do you make your home ready for an exchange?  By leaving it clean, with ample closet and bureau space, lots of information about the house, neighborhood and city, and a friendly welcome note!

House exchanging is a great way to travel.  Make it a new year’s resolution to try this increasingly popular way to go!

NEXT HOUSE EXCHANGE WORKSHOP: JANUARY 12!

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be running another house exchange workshop at the Hill Center on Sunday, January 12, at 2:00-4:00. The historic Hill Center is in the heart of Washington, DC’s Capitol Hill neighborhood at 921 Pennsylvania Avenue, SE, just 2 blocks from the Eastern Market metro stop.  My previous House Exchange Workshop at the Hill Center in June was standing-room-only with nearly 100 attendees and a waiting list.  The Jan. 12 workshop will provide new information on house exchanging, along with an overview of the nuts-and-bolts of swapping your home for someone else's.  The workshop will include a significant focus on house exchange websites and the many tools they offer and how to successfully navigate them.

Here are the kinds of places you can experience when you do house exchanging!  You can exchange over spring breaks, summers, Thanksgiving, or winter holidays – the choice is yours!

How about a trip to the beach?  You don’t have to wait until summer.  Here’s an exchange we did to the Florida Keys over Thanksgiving.

 

Or perhaps you’d enjoy a trip to the mountains instead?  This photo was taken from our house exchange cabin just outside of Yosemite National Park, California, over a spring break.

 

What about a trip to Europe next summer?  We’ve done two exchanges to London that have allowed us to see wonderful sights, like Tower Bridge.

 

A house exchange outside of Rome allowed us to experience history first-hand by touring places like the Collosseum.

 

So put Sunday, January 12, at 2:00 – 4:00 PM on your calendar!  The workshop is free of charge.  Here’s a link to register for it:  http://hillcenterdc.org/home/programs/1402/

I hope to see you there!

THE MANY SPIRITS OF FREIBURG, GERMANY

            The town of Freiburg is tucked into the southwest corner of Germany, nearly in France and close to Switzerland.  It has an amazing cathedral, the beautiful Munster, but other than that, there are not many of the “must see” elements of a European city that most tourists seek:  Roman ruins, for example, or world-class art collections or stunning architecture.  But what it lacks in virtuoso qualities, it makes up for with sheer charm.  Freiburg is the kind of place that Euro-trotting backpackers or package tour travelers “do” in a day or two.  Because of our house exchange, we were able to “do” Freiburg at the leisurely pace it deserves and as a result, we fell in love with the pretty little town.

            Only about 200,000 strong, Freiburg’s old city is a pedestrian-only zone centered around the Munster.  Only a clutch of the original medieval buildings still stand since the bulk of the old city was bombed to near obliteration in the waning days of WWII.  The cathedral survived, some say miraculously while others say it’s because the tall spire acted as a reference point for the Allied bombers to guide them in their operations amid a sea of rubble.  Whatever the reason – divine intervention or military expediency – the gorgeous red sandstone church dominates the old town.  Begun in 1200 and worked on over a three-century time span, the cathedral grew in size from a modest early thirteenth century church to a building whose tall lacy spire, and flying buttresses, and arched edges are recognizable throughout town.

            Along with its sheer size, the Munster cathedral is notable for its soft building material that requires near-constant repairs.  The sandstone is good for about 30-60 years before it begins to crumble.  Some townspeople claim that they’ve lived their whole lives in Freiburg and have never seen the Munster without some kind of scaffolding attached to its sides, dotted with masons and workmen repairing some eroding bit of the structure.

            Jutting out from the walls of the cathedral is an array of 90+ gargoyles whose ferocity is chilling, even to this modern-day sinner.  I can’t imagine what the imagination of a thirteenth century observer could do with the images of animals, both real and mythical, and humans, both anatomically correct or mixed with attributes that sprang from a dark creativity steeped in tales of damnation and gruesome eternal punishments for temporal crimes.  Among the leering, howling and gesturing gargoyles stand the towering statues of the prophets, looking down from on high.  Most earth-bound observers would be hard-pressed to make out the faces of the holy ones tucked into niches toward the top of the cathedral.  But thanks to the fabulous Augustiner Museum in Freiburg, some of the statues of the prophets and a handful of the scowling gargoyles have been ensconced in a specially-constructed gallery where you can walk among them and also, above them.  The gallery is ingenuously designed with small flights of stairs that take you adjacent to the wall-mounted gargoyles, and then another flight leads to vantage points above them so that you can look down on the elongated backs of the gargoyles and see the troughs carved into them.  Rainwater would flow down the backs of the gargoyles and out of the gaping mouth of the carved demons.

            The cathedral serves as a reference point for the old downtown, both figuratively and in the Middle Ages, literally.  Carved onto the wall next to the mammoth entry doors are measurements of interest to the common medieval person.  A circular shape from 1270 is next to another circular shape from 1317.  The shapes comported with the recommended size of a bread loaf.  Since a bustling market occupied the space outside of the cathedral (the market actually pre-dating the construction  of the church) medieval Maude or Mortimer could take her/his purchased loaf of bread over to the church’s wall and make sure that Hans the baker hadn’t skimped in the day’s baking.

            Along with the bread loaf shapes, several square and rectangular shapes are carved into the walls showing the standard size of a brick, bucket or beam.  The wall of the cathedral was the medieval man’s google search engine or handy Wikipedia. 

            All around the cathedral, the light-hearted spirit of Freiburg can be felt – and literally heard.  Small stone canals run parallel to the streets, a bit more than ankle-deep and about a foot wide, and filled with sparkling clear cold water.  Called “bachles,” these little street canals are Freiburg’s most noticeable feature.  Originally constructed about when construction on the cathedral first began, the 13^th century canals operated as medieval fire extinguishers.  The wooden houses, heated with fires and illuminated with candles, were a firefighters’ worse nightmare.  The baschles fed by diverted water from the nearby river, were an instant bucket brigade.  They could be quickly dammed and flooded to provide flame-extinguishing water.

            Today, the baschels operate as pure whimsy, which is found too rarely in life in general and cities in particular.  Local merchants sell small colorful wooden boats to children, who navigate the little crafts down the bubbling canals, holding a string tied to the boat and floating it along.  The baschles are also popular with toddlers and twenty-somethings, who kick off their shoes and wade in the cooling little canals on steamy summer days.  Needless to say, the dog population of Freiburg appreciates the handy little streams, going for walks in which the pooch parades down the canal while his owner walks on the adjacent sidewalk.  Since the canals are cleaned daily, they are fresh and appealing.  We sat in sidewalk cafes enjoying cool drinks or coffees and watching the parade of toddlers and others enjoying the cool little streams, wading in what was once the protective lifeblood of the city.  And is now, nothing but charming.  Like Freiburg itself.

HAPPY TRAILS

            Hiking in the Bernese Swiss Alps is like champagne for your feet.  And your eyes.  And your heart.  The trails are narrow dirt paths, or paved walkways, or gravelly snaking footpaths.  A number of trails start above Murren, the tiny car-free village that nestles on an outcropping above the Lauterbrunnen Valley. To access the trails, you catch a cablecar from Murren and climb, at an almost vertical angle, up a thousand feet or so.  As the cable car slides up the mountain, we pass sweating farmers, men and women, cutting hay with odd scything tractors and raking it into swathes with long-handled wooden rakes.  It has been surprisingly hot, even up at 7,000 and 8,000 feet elevation, with temperatures hovering in the high 80s and near 90.  The sweating women rake the golden hay onto big gray tarps whose sides they gather up to form a sling.  The sling is loaded onto a trailer that’s been attached to a tractor, and the tractor heads straight downhill with its load, or climbs vertically up to the next field.  Everything seems to defy gravity:  the tractor slowly crawling up the mountain face; the women raking while their feet grip the sheer mountainside, the cable car floating through space higher and higher.

            We reach the top and disembark.  Because it’s Switzerland, there’s a lovely restaurant at the top, with outdoor seating that overlooks breathless beauty.  And because it’s Switzerland, there’s a children’s playground at the top, too.  The Swiss seem to value the mountains, hiking, excellent viewpoints, good food, and happy playing children.  Everywhere we go, whenever there is a cable car or train stop with a great view, there’s a restaurant and a play area.  Mom and Dad sip beers, the grandparents tuck into hearty platters of food, and the kids slide and swing and have a great time.  Something for everyone.

            Where the Almendhubel cable car deposits us, directly opposite the massive faces of the Eiger, Munch and Jungfrau Mountains, there’s an additional attraction by the obligatory restaurant-play area combo.  We see several Swiss adults and kids headed to it with relish.  Taking off their shoes, they step first into a square that is filled with big rocks.  They walk over the rocks with their bare feet, and then step down into a second square filled with smaller rocks.  Over the rocks they go, and then step into a third square filled with gravel, followed by a fourth filled with woodchips, and a fifth filled with wooden bars.  The sixth step-down is into a calf-high trough of icy cold water.  Ahhh.  Nothing spells good podiatry fun more than walking over rocks, gravel, sawdust, and wood and then wading through glacial runoff.  We watch several people line up for the experience, laughing all the way.

            Although it’s difficult to say no to the opportunity to rip the flesh off your feet on a variety of unaccommodating surfaces, I decide to keep my boots on and embark on a trail that heads off through fields filled with Alpine wildflowers.  White, purple, golden, red; from teeny star shapes to big-headed blossoms; ground cover to knee-high; singles to clumps – the flowers are every shape and color.  It’s a profusion of colors, rainbows in the grass.  And the grass itself is a shimmering green, so that it’s a verdant background starred with colors and shapes.

            Jeff and Max and I hike along, and encounter big Swiss cows.  BIG Swiss cows, their hides a soft tan.  They are all Mamas and babies but the Mamas still have horns.  They bear around their necks gigantic oversized bells that ring with every motion of their heads.  It has to drive them nuts.  Or drive them deaf.  Or both.  But it doesn’t seem to bother them.  They stand in fields along the trails and occasionally, on the trail itself, turning their big heads to watch us hike by.  One cow actually trots up to Max and stands before him, looking him in the eye, clearly waiting for something.  “What’s with this cow?” Max asks.  I’ve read that the cows liked to be petted but thought it was a joke. When I told Max, he reached out a hand and tentatively patted the cow on the forehead.  The cow moved a step closer and leaned into the caress.  Max patted her more enthusiastically and the cow definitely gave off a satisfied aura.  The cow stared after us, a bit regretfully I thought, as we moved away.

            Farms and farmhouses are sprinkled among the valleys we hike through.  The trail at times goes directly through farmyards.  I imagined the private property rights crowd in America going crazy at the thought of sharing nature with hikers.  Some of the farms have opened up little cafes: a table or two scattered on the grass beside the farmhouse.  We stop at one to get out of a high-mountain thunderstorm. We have coffee and Max has a “milkshake,” which is just a glass of milk flavored with chocolate.  Inside part of the farm complex is a cheese making operation. The farm is an old dairy, and inside sit huge wheels of cheese.  We buy a small slab.  It’s salty and mild-flavored. 

            The farms we come across are all working farms, including one from which several farm hands (kids of the farmer, it looked like, along with the farmer himself) had been dispatched to bring the herd down from the mountains for the night.  We stood on the trail and watched.  Down a nearly vertical incline, from the high mountain valley where they’d grazed all day, came a herd of cows, ambling in small groups of two or three.  Then the farmer whistled at his border collie, who snapped to attention. The farmer waved an arm at the most far-flung cow, and the dog dropped into a low, ground-hugging posture and took off like a shot, running up to the cow’s face and startling it so that it turned and joined its fellows.  The border collie trotted back to the farmer, awaiting further orders.  The farmer, impatient at the cows’ slow pace, sent out the dog again, and it went to work, nipping at the heels of the cows, circling right at their noses, hugely outsized by the cows but a dozen times more nimble on its feet than its bovine charges.  The dog got the cows into a faster walk, then a trot, then a downhill careen as the cows moved toward the barn at what can only be described as a brisk gallop.  I’ve never seen cows run before, and I’ve never watched a border collie do the work that is in its genes.  All told, the round-up took 20 minutes or so, and the cows collected at the bottom of the mountain and broke into two single-file lines, and walked slowly, one by one, into the barn to be milked.

            We smiled at the farmer appreciately, and he smiled back.  As does everyone on the trail.  On the Murren side of the Lauterbrunnen Valley, the hikers are nearly all Swiss or German.  As they approach us on the trail, they invariably look us in the eye and smile and say the Swiss version of hello, which is a regional dialect slang for the formal German “good day.”  Many times, they also say some little pleasantry that I can’t make out, but understand it to be the equivalent of, “Lovely day!” or “Wasn’t that last twist of the trail a killer!” They are friendly and open; eye contact is a must; chatting is advised. 

            On the Wengen side of the Valley where many more tour groups pass through, the hikers are more international:  Brits, French, some Italians, a few Germans and Swiss, and even a few Americans.  On this side of the valley, the trails are far more crowded.  Needless to say, I prefer the Murren side, with its more peaceful and isolated trails, and fellow hikers whose roots go down deep into the local soil.

As we go hike the trails above Murren, we see locals of all ages and in all configurations:  white-haired couples out enjoying a nice hike; families with young children; single people; and grown kids with their parents.  On a lovely, hot summer afternoon, with the sky a deep blue and the Eiger, Munch and Jungfrau mountains rearing their white-capped heads above us, the Swiss are out enjoying their land.  And so are we.

A ROOM WITH A VIEW TO DIE FOR

            Our travels to the Swiss Alps have led us here, to a cosy upstairs apartment in a house in Wengwald. This photo was taken out of the bedroom window - the edge of the wooden windowframe is just visible in the upper right corner.  This is the view this apartment looks out onto.  Wengwald is not so much a village as it is a collection of people’s homes that are clustered on a shelf of land jutting out above the Lauterbrunnen Valley and facing the massive Jungfrau Mountain.  Wengwald isn’t even a routine train stop.  When we’re on the train and want it to stop at Wengwald, we have to press a stop request button on the wall of the train.  That will cause the train to stop at the lean-to by the side of the road that is the Wengwald “train station.” 

            If we’re in Wengwald and want to go somewhere, we go to the Wengwald lean-to and attached to it are two small panels.  One reads “Wengen” and the other “Lauterbrunnen.”  Below each village’s name are a vertical series of 3 buttons.  You push the center one to ask the next train to stop.  Once you push it, the top button lights up. If you change your mind and want to cancel a train, you push the bottom red button that turns off your request. Somehow, our request is magically transmitted to oncoming trains, which will slow to a stop by the lean-to and allow us to clamber onboard while curious passengers watch, trying to figure out where the hell we’ve come from.

            Sometimes, we press the button on the wall of the lean-to asking for the next Wengen-bound or Lauterbrunnen-bound train to stop but it goes right by us.  The conductor motions to us through the windshield, holding up his hand and displaying a certain number of fingers:  1, 2 or 3.  It’s to indicate that there are one or more trains coming right behind him, and rather than have him stop at Wengwald and hold those trains up, the last one behind him will stop and gather us. So we stand and watch the train go by, and a minute later, then next train, and then another, and then the last one stops.  This is only when it’s very busy.  Otherwise, the train comes just once every half-hour and if you miss it, you wait.

            I chose to stay in Wengwald rather than the much fancier and well-known Wengen because I found a listing for this 2-bedroom apartment, on the top floor of a 3-floor rustic chalet.  The apartment is fully equipped so we can cook, and there’s ample space for the 3 of us. But what made me choose this place was the view from its windows.   The low ceilings of the apartment are knotty pine, and inset in the walls are windows that you can throw open on wooden sashes and marvel at the view:  you are nose-to-nose with the mighty, 14,000 foot high Jungfrau Mountain.  Wengwald occupies a spit of land that juts out above the Lauterbrunnen Valley and faces the glacier-encrusted slopes of the massive mountain.  From the bedroom and living room windows we stare out directly onto glacial peaks.  We overlook the verdant length of the Lauterbrunnen Valley, with waterfalls sliding down the craggy rock walls.  And stare directly onto the Alps. 

            As far as I was concerned, this apartment could have been one-room constructed of slime.  The views are what drew me, and the fact that the apartment is well-equipped and comfortable is gravy.

            When we get off the train at the lean-to, we walk along a gravel path to the collection of wooden homes that is Wengwald.  A farmer puts his tractor into low gear and laboriously climbs the hillside, almost vertical, dragging a load of freshly cut and raked hay.  He nods to us.  The path winds among the houses, which have lovely flower and vegetable gardens, with hollyhocks standing tall, and geraniums in flower boxes below the windows. The houses are made of dark wood.  Everyone knows everyone else in this clutch of 20 homes, and they nod and smile at us as we crunch along the path.  Kids play, and as we walk, we look down upon the valley and onto the face of the snow-encrusted Alps.

            We get to our apartment and fling open the unscreened windows.  Nothing is between us and this million-dollar view.  The only sounds are cowbells ringing as cows and donkeys graze below the house.  A constant dull roar sounds from the waterfalls sluicing their way down the rock faces of the mountains, including the famous Staubach Falls, which is illuminated with floodlights at night.  The cowbells jingle, the waterfalls are a subdued hum in the background, and the sun glints off the glaciers and refracts into a perfect blue sky.  Below the snow-laced granite mountain tops are rocky hillsides covered in deep green fir forests.  I can see brightly colored red and orange para-sailers floating down from the sheer rock walls where they leap out above the valley, to veer with the breeze and sink slowly down to the valley floor.

            Although this is not a house exchange, our trip to Belgium to exchange homes in Brussels, followed by a trip to Germany to exchange homes in Freiburg, has allowed us to add a week in Switzerland where we can afford to pay for this apartment in the Bernese Alps.  Which is set squarely in the middle of heaven.

 

MAGIC MOUNTAINS: THE SWISS BERNESE ALPS

            The Lauterbrunnen Valley in the Swiss Bernese Alps is what spawned the cheesy Swiss calendars we’ve all seen in auto repair shops and in doctor’s waiting rooms.  It is the Alps of pancake house placemats, and collectible porcelain figures that grandmothers are fond of.  But this mountain-lined valley is the reality behind the cliché.  It’s Helen – the face that launched a thousand ships and sparked the Trojan Wars.  It’s Cleopatra as played by Elizabeth Taylor – hopelessly, unmatchably beautiful.  It’s beauty defined in granite and lush grasses and towering glaciers.

            The Lauterbrunnen Valley lies above Interlaken, which is a touristy-cute town between two lakes.  To get to the Lauterbrunnen Valley, you must take a little yellow or orange train to Lauterbrunnen, the town that lies along the valley floor.  From Lauterbrunnen you can take a cable car up a steep mountain face to a tiny train station, and catch an even smaller, one-carriage train into Murren, a car-free village cupped in a cleft in the mountains.  Or from Lauterbrunnen, you can take a little train that grinds its way straight up the opposite mountain’s face to Wengen, another car-free village that’s bigger than tiny Murren but still a one-street affair. 

Either choice brings you chin to chin with the big mountains.  Either choice requires that you climb out of the Lauterbrunnen Valley into the heart of the Alps, which grandfathered the valley a long millennia ago.  The valley winds along at the foot of the mountains, carved by glaciers that bullied their way through stone.  Water trumped rock.  The weight of snow, the probing fingers of ice, the eroding drip, drip, drip of meltwater, the flowing sheets of waterfalls, made a deep cleft in granite.  The valley was born.

Now it is an emerald green expanse of fields and trees, farmed in tidy squares and marked with the red tile-roofed houses of Lauterbrunnen.  Waterfalls fed by glaciers cascade down the sides of the mountains.  They have been counted at 72, but there are arteries of waterfalls and spidery veins of them, too, conveying the life-blood of water from the glacier-smothered mountain tops.  At night, the town of Lauterbrunnen shines a huge electric light on the biggest waterfall, casting a beam upwards from the valley floor onto this shimmering sheet of water.  We hiked up the side of the mountain and stood behind the waterfall in a cleft carved out by some enterprising engineers nearly a hundred years ago.  I stood on the water-slicked gray rock, a shimmer of waterfall flying by my face, both inside the mountain and clinging to it side, simultaneously.

It’s the mountains, though, that draw my eye, beyond the cascades of water and green valley and cute little villages.  The big three tower above at all times:  the Eiger, its faced sheered off by glaciers.  On one side, it’s a pointy mountain.  On the other side, it is a flat surface, one half of its triangular apex surgically removed by the crushing weight of glaciers.   Beside it is Monch, with jagged edges.  And beside it the mighty Jungfrau.  The mountain top is a half-circle with ragged edges scratching at the sky.  Its concave side, also collapsed by glaciers, swoops up into a series of points and peaks, as if the force of the glacier smashing down the side of the mountain caused a new rock formation to burst out.  After the Jungfrau there are more peaks and serrated tips, massive knobs and cones of stone:  a mountain range of grandfathers lining the valley.

Glaciers lie in the folds of the mountains.  Some look exactly like what they are:  frozen rivers of snow, caught in a tumble down the mountain in a time-lapse of sub-freezing temperatures, which have trapped the gurgling liquid movement of river into a frozen expanse of ice.  Rims of snow line the jagged edges of the very tops of the mountains.  The snow hangs off the mountain, a lip of whiteness stories high.  The snow is frozen motion.  Movement arrested in mid-air.

What makes these mountains so extraordinary is that they are touchably close.  The air is so clear it nearly shimmers.  It is the difference between tapwater and spring water: both are water, but the quality of the two is very different.  Here the air is clear to the point of near liquidity.  Distances are collapsed.  You feel like you can reach out, from the trail or the hotel window alike, reach out and touch the mountains, they feel so close, so unseparated from the viewing eye.

In the face of this grandeur, I cannot look away.

THE KING IS RETIRED -- LONG LIVE THE KING!

 

 

                Yesterday, on July 21, King Albert of Belgium stepped down after a 20 year reign to allow his son, Phillip, to take over.  It appears that Albert got tired of politics.  Who can blame him?  Politics takes it out of the best of us, but it’s unusual to hear of a monarch getting burned out on what’s generally considered to be a pretty cushy job.  But Belgium is a bit different, as is true in so many ways.  It went without a government for about a year-and-a-half, riven by division between its Flemish-speaking north and French-speaking south.  Flemish is basically a dialect of Dutch, and the northern speakers of Dutch-Flemish ( Flutch?) are more prosperous than their French-speaking southern cousins.  Evidently the Flutch are pretty ticked-off over carrying the Frogs, whom they feel wield undue power in national decision-making.  So the Flutch and Frogs hit a governmental stalemate:  neither side had enough power to form a government, so the country went without for nearly 18 months. 

            Imagine that.  A country with a government so polarized and divided that it can’t effectively govern.  It sounds so . . . .  what’s the word I want? . . . . ah yes, Congressional.  But the U.S. doesn’t possess Belgium’s secret weapon, the force that was needed to knock heads together and compel action:  a king.  Apparently, King Albert had been cruising along for years, doing what monarchs do:  appearing at formal state functions, waving genially to crowds, looking interested as boring people explained things.  Then the government actually came to a standstill and the impasse dragged on and on.  So long, in fact, that King Albert actually had to put aside the ceremonial pomp and roll up his (perfectly tailored) sleeves and get the opposing sides to come up with a compromise. 

            The effort proved successful since there is now a prime minister and the government is chugging along, albeit with a good deal of acrimony.  But the experience soured King Albert and he decided to hand the crown over to his son, Phillip.  And perhaps retire to a lovely home in the country and take up a hobby, which, since he’s Belgian, might involve beer-brewing or perhaps mussel-farming. 

            The crown hand-off occurred yesterday, on July 21, which is already a national holiday in Belgium.  King Albert probably reasoned that everybody would be off work for the holiday, stores would be closed, fireworks were planned, and the populace was prepared for the annual festivities so why not tack an abdication onto the day?  It would be sort of like adding the Inauguration onto the 4^th of July venue to save everybody the time and expense of planning yet another party. 

            Quite unwittingly, we ended up with front-row views of the new king as he did his first official duty after being crowned:  laying a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Brussels.  We had decided to head down to the Royal Palace to take in the festivities. The Palace is a short walk from the historic old square, and activities were planned from it to the square and beyond.  Since it was a national holiday, the trolley services were limited, so we walked from our house exchange house toward the Palace.  When we got about 6-7 blocks from the Palace, we saw people lined up against barriers, waiting expectantly.  One of the many extremely nice Brussels citizens (Brussilians?  Brusszens?) told me that the king would arrive to lay a wreath at the tomb – a duty performed by the monarch every year on this day, and the new king’s first job assignment.  So we stopped in our tracks, claimed an empty spot against the barricades, and waited.    

            A lone policewoman shoo’d away cars that didn’t realize the street was closed.  Then a van of secret service men showed up, and they were the universal secret service guys:  cropped hair, eyes constantly scanning the crowd, wires running from the ear to their hidden walkie talkie.  A couple of them sauntered past us and after a cursory look around, wandered out onto the street and stood chatting.  Journalists with cameras strolled over to the Tomb, which is marked by a giant obelisk crowned with a figure known to all (except us.)   No one asked to see their press credentials.  A man colorfully dressed in red, black and gold patterned shorts – Belgium’s national colors – and a matching scarf over his shoulder, stood among a couple of camaflouge wearing military guys.  The military men were 20 feet from the Tomb, and the brightly dressed guy lounged with them, chatting animatedly.  A 20-something young man, bearing a camera and an earnest expression, approached a police officer who solicitously guided him to a better spot to view and photograph the planned event. 

Then a platoon of police men and women came marching up the street, two by two, stamping down their left foot hard to punctuate their cadence:  ONE two, ONE two, LEFT right, LEFT right, they marched.  They interspersed themselves along the crowd barricade and stood at attention, looking natty in their pressed navy blue trousers, white short-sleeved shirts and cocky blue hats.  They were mostly young, and all of them were remarkably fit.  Flat-stomached and lithe, they bore no resemblance to the typical specimen of DC’s finest.   

            The marching band arrived and marched around the obelisk and stood at attention before us.  The crowds were picking up now, but they were still only two or three people deep along the barricade.  It wasn’t exactly a standing-room-only turnout for the new king’s first official duty.  And there was no security.  No one examined our backpacks; there were no metal screening devices; no buses parked in intersections to block potential car bombers. There was no attempt to block, examine or limit the public from witnessing this event.  A couple of people on bikes rode down the street and the police looked on, disinterested.  People lounged in windows of houses and hotels along the street, the sash’s thrown open so they could lean out and see the show.   

            Shiny black cars started arriving, and stopped just a short distance from us.  The old king got out of one to a smattering of applause.  The prime minister, young and energetic looking with his suit coat slung over his shoulder, emerged from another car.  A few minutes later, the band struck up a song and a car pulled up and the new king got out, looking dashing in a dark suit with a big purple sash slung over one shoulder.  He paused and waved genially, then went to the Tomb, made some remarks that were no doubt kingly in tone, laid a wreath on the Tomb, walked back to the car, waved again, and climbed in.  The car drove right by us, the window down, the king waving and smiling.  Many people clapped, some people chanted something that sounded pissed-off, everyone shaded their eyes from the brilliant hot sun, and the king drove by, looking like he was having a pretty good day for his first day on the job. 

            Then everyone picked up their bags and backpacks, loaded the kids back into the strollers, stowed their jaunty black-red-yellow Belgian flags, and wandered off to the next event.  We had just witnessed the new king of the country come and go, within arm’s reach of the public.  It was casual safety.  I suddenly realized that I’d forgotten what that was like.   

            The comparison between this leader’s public appearance in his nation’s capitol city, and Obama’s appearances in America’s capitol city, is stunning.  We attended the presidential inauguration in January, and had to buy tickets in advance, after waiting for hours in line, to just get bleacher seats along the parade route.  On the day of the inauguration, we had to walk blocks and blocks before being able to get to the parade route because city buses were parked at all the intersections to block access to Pennsylvania Avenue.  We went through metal detectors to get to the bleachers, and had to surrender a small backpack we’d been unwise enough to bring. No backpacks, bottles, or anything remotely serviceable as a device of antagonism, were allowed.   Once we claimed our assigned bleacher seat, we witnessed armed military police and DC police on every corner, along every street, and in every square.  Sharpshooters patrolled the tops of buildings.  Bomb-sniffing dogs trotted down the streets; mail boxes and garbage cans were removed so that bombs couldn’t be placed in them.  Helicopters hovered overhead.  We were there to witness the leader of the world’s greatest democracy, and to do so, we had to surround ourselves to an arsenal of weapons wielded in an atmosphere of suspicious, watchful distrust. 

            There are obvious reasons why security is high around Obama and not King Phillip.  For one thing, the typical Belgian is not armed to the teeth and capable of bringing down the monarch.  For another thing, Phillip is a low-profile kind of leader, unknown outside of Europe.  Obama is known world-wide.   And of course, Belgium doesn’t have America’s track record of attempted and successful assassinations.

            But Belgium is no stranger to terrifying, gun-wielding haters intent on subduing it.  Belgium knows something about attacks on its people and cities.  It has been occupied by Nazis and German WWI troops, it’s been bombed and blasted to bits, it has seen tens of thousands of its young men die in battle on the country’s own turf.  But for all its been through, for all the years of wars and violence and death, you can still stroll along the main street of Belgium’s capitol and wave at the king as he goes by.