The highlight of the summer of 1995, for me, was two weeks I spent in a run down mountain hostel in Switzerland.

Lest you think it looks too much like it's from a movie, that guy in the foreground was waving to someone to get them to throw him the frisbee (not waving goodbye or anything syrupy like that).

Like most people there, I adopted a 2 day cycle:

Day 1:  Go hiking. Come back exhilarated. Drink too much wine, while some guys try to pick up chicks by playing guitar and singing REM's "Losing my religion". Singing along anyway because you're so drunk.

Day 2: Spend next day on the porch (everyone just called it a "porch day"), recovering. You might have considered this a waste - but from that porch, the views were spectacular. Incidentally, this is where I first learnt to play the card game "Hearts".

Day 3: Repeat Day 1

Like most people, before I got there I thought I'd spent 2 or 3 days. Also like most people, I ended up staying there for 2 whole weeks. It was that great a place (especially if you didn't have any money!).

I had never seen scenery like this before - gorgeous alpine meadows with wild flowers everywhere... Here's my favourite picture from the time, that really sums everything up. That's a picture of me eating an apple, wearing a trashy "Michelangelo" shirt I'd bought in Rome.

Here was the view facing the other way:

And here are some more pictures from that hike:

(can you see the person walking up the Alpine meadow in the picture above?)

And... here's a picture of me again, at a glacier (a different hike to the one before...)

I've thought about going back there, quite a few times, for a vacation. Gimmelwald II - Return to Gimmelwald! Can it be as good as the original? Name a single movie whose sequel is better than the original... Nahh... I think that I am better off experiencing new things, rather than attempting to repeat old ones.