It's been too long since our last hike, but that's how life goes. Our lives are filled with other activities and busy with other things and we haven't had time on any of the other weekends to go out hiking. But we're maintaining at least a hike each month so far, which I can't ask for too much more. Although somehow in February we squeezed in a hike each week for a total of 4 hikes that month, but I guess we were just overachievers that month...

It's been a while since we've hiked in Boulder, and soon it will be too hot to even attempt hiking in Boulder. We went to a new trail that opened earlier this year - the Anemone Loop. The city of Boulder did a good job with this trail, and it was a lot of fun to hike this loop which gave us some great views looking in all directions.

We got to the trailhead around 9am, and started on the hike that ended up taking less than 2 hours. The parking lot surprisingly wasn't packed full which is the biggest unknown when it comes to hiking in Colorado, so we were glad to get a spot. The hike took us through some rock formations known as the Red Rocks that I had no idea existed in Boulder. They were slender rocks standing straight up which reminded me a lot of Devil's Backbone area in Loveland, although the Red Rock in Boulder didn't have nearly as many of these rocks as the Devil's Backbone area.

From the Red Rocks Trail, we headed West to the Anemone Loop trail where we hiked counterclockwise around the loop. We made it to Anemone Point which had great panoramic views of all of Boulder and all of the Western mountains.

Overall, it was a good hike that I would recommend to others. The temperatures were already quite high (upper 70's) for my liking, but I guess it is nearly summer, so I can't ask for much when hiking at only 6,000 feet.

We got into London in the morning after catching a redeye flight direct from Denver. The plane ride was pretty smooth and felt like it was a shorter flight than it actually was. Neither Katie nor I were able to sleep on the plane, which was unfortunate since we had a lot of walking planned for the day. But we also planned to take it somewhat easy since we knew we would be pretty jetlagged and that we wouldn't get any sleep on the plane.

It ended up taking longer than we expected to get into the city. It took about 2 hours to get out of the airport and then one hour to ride into the center of the city. Once we were in the center of the city, we walked a few blocks to our hotel to drop off our bags and go exploring. The weather wasn't that great, mostly overcast with some threat of rain. Every time we went into the Underground and came out the weather was different. I don't know if that's because the weather changes that quickly or if it's because the areas we were going to were far enough apart that the weather was really different, but it felt like we were rolling a dice and getting random weather everywhere.

When we headed out of the hotel without our bags it was raining a little bit. We headed out to go see the Big Ben area and the Tower Bridge. After that, we went and checked into our hotel, grabbed our jackets, and headed back out to go to Buckingham Palace. Of course, once having our jackets the rain cleared up and got sunny and warm, but I won't complain about walking the city without rain. We got to Buckingham Palace to see they were setting up for some kind of cycling event, so there were stadium stands and construction equipment all over the place, so we didn't take any photos there. Instead, we walked around the park enjoying the scenery.

We had dinner at a pretty cool authentic pub that had really good and original decorations. The atmosphere was the best part, although they didn't set the bar very high with the quality of the food or the beer. Katie did get to try her second Firkin beer, and this time it was an English Bitter (the first one she had was a fruited Firkin from Grim Brothers).

Even though we tried to take it easy, we ended up walking the most steps in a day than I've ever done - 23,000. I guess we didn't really take it easy. But since our train left in the morning for Belgium, this was our only opportunity on this trip to see London.

We arrived in Bruges by train mid-afternoon around 2. It was a long walk from the train station to our Airbnb to drop our bags. We didn't waste any time seeing the city and even made it to 2 breweries. The first brewery, Bourgogne des Flandres, was pretty cool and had great beers and a laidback atmosphere. The thing that stuck out to me from that brewery was that they didn't squirt the glasses with water as they do in the States to wash off any beer that spilled over. Instead, they just dunked the filled glasses partially in the dishwater which cleaned off the sticky beer from the outside of the glass. That's apparently something that they do in Belgium that probably isn't that weird to them, but it was weird enough that the memory stuck with me.

I proposed to Katie at the second brewery, De Halve Maan. I wasn't sure which brewery I was going to propose at, but I planned on doing it some time while we were drinking. We have a tradition for us to save up memes for each other to share with each other when we're out drinking, so while she was scrolling through the memes on my phone I had saved up for her, I got out the ring box and proposed right after she scrolled to a Game of Thrones "Brace Yourself" meme with a caption that said "Brace yourself, a ring is coming", to which she looked up with a very expectant face fully knowing what was coming next.

The success of the day can't only be measured by the proposal, we also got two waffles during the day, the first one was a little too gooey in the middle, and I wasn't crazy about the caramel topping that I got on it but overall it was a successful waffle day.

We had dinner at a nice restraint that the owner of the Airbnb recommended, Gran Kaffee De Passage. We made the mistake of not making a reservation, but luckily we were early enough to get a seat at the small bar. The food was pretty good, but I really liked the place for the atmosphere and to watch the waiters. There were only 2 waiters for the 15-ish table restaurant, and they were running around like crazy the whole time - I can't believe they work like that every night! It was so busy when we were trying to leave that the waiter that took our order told me after about 10 minutes of waiting to ask the other waiter for our check because he wasn't going to get to it. The other neat thing from the waiter-watching was that the bartender scrapped the foam off the top of the beer glasses, as opposed to what I'm used to which is either over-filling to get the foam off or slowly pouring and topping the glass off after the foam settles. But I guess they didn't have time for either of those things, and it was neat and different than getting a beer in the States. Other than the waiter-watching, one of the coolest things about the meal was that we got a basket of fries with dinner - very similar to getting a basket of bread, but this was just a basket of fries.

Today was our main day in Bruges, so we started off with an excellent breakfast at Li O Lait. There was a little bit of a language barrier with the waitress. I suspect she was new which also didn't help our case, but we managed to get our order across and it came out correctly. Katie got a coffee drink that she's never tried before - a Dalgona. A Dalgona is just a whipped cold latte, and it came out a complete mess (but she enjoyed drinking). We had trouble finding good coffee shops in Europe while we were there, and this was one of the good ones that Katie was able to get her coffee fix at.

After breakfast, we had a nice walk along the river to go see all of the bridges in Brugge. There's not a whole lot to say about the bridges other than that they're bridges, but I will say that it was pretty difficult getting the shots that we wanted without any tour boats in the shots. The tour boats weren't very photogenic, so we were often waiting for either boats or people on the bridges to clear out of the way.

Since we had a pretty large breakfast we weren't up for a real meal for lunch. We stopped in the market square in the middle of the city to get a traditional Belgium snack - Frits and mayonnaise. It was served in a paper boat with the mayo right on the top of the fries with cute little wooden spears to eat the fries with.

After lunch we headed to go see the windmills which were really cool. We got to go up inside one of them to see the inner working of the windmill which was my favorite part as an engineer. I was able to look at everything and make sense of it all and see how this simple machine worked. Being up in the windmill was a little shaky and unstable, but that's understandable since the windmill sits on a single pillar in the middle. It sits on a pillar to be able to rotate to always face the wind. I've never put much thought into it, but it makes sense that the whole windmill would need to be able to move around to face the direction of the wind.

Had dinner at a restaurant called Julia's where I had some really tasty lamb, and Katie got a traditional Belgium eel dish. Katie's was really fishy and wasn't that great, so she ended up eating some of my meal which was fine because there was plenty for us to share. We made a reservation this time since we barely got to eat at the place the night before, but we were the only ones in the restaurant when we got there (granted it was a little early for dinner at 6 pm). Overall dinner was nice but the restaurant was a little too fancy for us. Like last night's dinner spot, this too was a recommendation of our Airbnb host, and in retrospect, I think our Airbnb host was giving us a recommendation for her favorite restaurant (last night's dinner - which we enjoyed a lot) and for something that was a little more upscale (tonight's dinner - which isn't really our style).

Throughout the day we did some shopping and stopped by a chocolate store. There were so many chocolate stores that we asked our Airbnb host if they had a recommendation and went there to get some chocolate to snack on throughout the day. On our shopping excursion, Katie found a really cute summer dress at a very reasonable price, which was good because she deserves nice things and needs some more summer dresses.

This was our travel day to Switzerland which meant spending a lot of time traveling and not a lot of time taking photos. Today was a holiday in Belgium, so there weren't as many trains running, which meant we had to get up way earlier than we would have liked to catch the train to the airport. After landing in Zurich, we took the train to Lucern and checked into our Airbnb. It was mid-afternoon before we were ready to go start exploring the city.

We went to drink at a bar called Bierliebe and Friends and got 2 flights of beer that allowed us to try 8 different local Switzerland beers. We weren't overly impressed with any of them, but there was one that we liked quite a bit - Post Hibernation Hydration Pale Ale from Bachweg Brewing. It was a really good pale ale that had good fruity and almost honey notes to it. Afterward, we went to a local brewery and got a pitcher of their Summer Wheat Ale which was pretty delicious. The Summer Wheat Ale wasn't all that complicated but it was a smooth, light, and refreshing beer (and we finished the whole pitcher). That brewery only had 2 beers on tap - their house beer and one seasonal beer. So not very much, but they did their seasonal really well so I guess that works for them. We got some lunch there too and it was incredibly expensive, I only got some hot dogs with potato salad, and Katie got some sausage with cheese and lettuce, plus the pitcher of beer was 70 Franc! US Dollar and Franc were almost exactly one-to-one, so that seemed pretty expensive meal for what we got.

We learned pretty quickly after getting to Switzerland that everything in Switzerland is really expensive. It got us looking up what the average salaries are for both our professions (Katie would make a lot more and I would make about the same), but housing prices (and food and general cost of living) is at least 2x. Not that we would move here, but it is interesting to see what our professions are valued at from a compensation standpoint in each of the countries that we visit.

We walked along the lake in search of some good views before heading back to the Airbnb. We planned to rest for about an hour, do some laundry, and then go do some photographing before dinner, but Katie ended up falling asleep and we didn't really have dinner that night. The laundry machine was super confusing, we somehow got the washing machine to work, but never got the dryer to work so we ended up just hang drying the clothes.

Today, we went up to Jungfraujoch which is the saddle between Jungfrau and Monch. Jungfraujoch is the highest point in the Alps that you can get to by train. The tickets were really expensive, over $200 per person, but so is everything else in Switzerland so we bit the bullet and got our tickets. We started the day by taking a train to Grindelwald - which in itself was an additional $60 per person.

Before hopping on the gondola from Grindelwald to start heading up the mountain we stopped at a grocery store to grab lunch foods. The cafeteria at Jungfraujoch didn't have great reviews for food, and after spending what felt like a fortune on the tickets up there we wanted a more cost-effective lunch. We grabbed a loaf of bread, some Alpine cheese, some salami, and iced coffee before continuing on our journey. The coffee was for drinking now, the rest was for lunch. I don't remember how much that cost, but it was one of the lesser expensive meals that we had in Switzerland (I think it was around $15-20).

The journey to Jungfraujoch once in Grindelwald was split into 2 parts: a gondola ride followed by a train ride. We stopped between the gondola and the train to take photos. Many people continued on without stopping, but I'm glad we stopped to enjoy the scenery before getting to the snowy peak scenery. It was a distinctive difference between the middle point and the top of the mountain most noticeable by the amount of snow. At the halfway point, there was no snow on the ground and the temperatures were still comfortable enough that we were in our t-shirts with no jackets. Once we got to Jungfraujoch where there was a dense snowpack, we definitely needed our jackets to be outside.

Once at Jungfraujoch we started on the adventure by going to the ice palace first. The ice palace was just some tunnels going through the ice, which was fun but didn't feel authentic (like we were really on top of a mountain). But we had fun and slid around on the ice before making it to the first observation area. We were prepared with clothing, but Katie was underprepared in the sense that she didn't have sunglasses. Since the area was covered in snow, it was really bright. From there we continued on to the Sphinx Observation area which had even better views of all the surrounding mountains. This is where we spent most of our time and where we ate our picnic lunch. Despite being an inexpensive lunch, it felt like a very appropriate lunch - eating Switzerland cheese at the top of the Swiss Alps.

We took a different route down, first taking the same train back down halfway, but then taking another train down the rest of the way which gave us different views. It was a little hard to take photos on the train so I tried to just enjoy the scenery for the most part rather than taking a bunch of photos. We didn't make it back to Lucerne until around 8pm, so by that time we were pretty hungry and ready for dinner.

Our dinner was at Fondue House Du Pont and we got first some cheese fondue followed by chocolate fondue. It was great, and it was way too much food. It costs us almost $130, but it was worth it to experience this traditional Switzerland food.

Overall I'm glad we went up to Jungfraujoch, despite the cost, although I would have liked there to be more outdoor areas. There were only two places where you could get outside and just one trail that you could safely hike (although we didn't hike it so that we didn't make Katie go blind from the sun reflecting off the snow). Jungfraujoch felt like a small amusement park that you paid for rather than paying for a ticket to get you to the top and back down.

On our second full day in Switzerland we stayed in town. The weather was forecasted to be overcast and rainy all day, so we decided not to do anything in the Alps. But the weather in Lucerne ended up being great, overcast in the morning and mid-60s temperature all day with the sun coming out in the afternoon. The weather in Switzerland has been pretty perfect - from the morning to the evening shorts and t-shirts are all I have needed.

The morning started off by going to a pretty good cafe that had really good coffee. We both got pretty traditional dishes - me with rosti (hash browns) and Katie got müesli (yogurt with granola and fruit). We went to the Musegg Wall, a medieval wall erected in the 13th century. We were able to go up into a couple of the towers and even walk on top of the Musegg wall. It was free to do too, which seemed like a steal considering everything in this town costs money. We passed by a small farm along the wall and thought nothing of it, although Katie got excited when she saw the farm cat and it let her pet it.

We continued on getting some lunch at one of the places we had some beers at on the first day - Bierliebe and Friends. We had an easy quick lunch and continued on with our day. The afternoon consisted of Katie taking a quick nap before we headed out to go see the Lion Memorial - a lion carved into the side of a cliff. The statue commemorates the Swiss Guard who were massacred in Paris in the French Revolution (17892). It was very similar to many of the statues that we saw all through Europe except that this wasn't a free-standing sculpture - it was carved directly into the wall, making it an even more impressive sculpture.

We bought some chees and chocolate souvenirs on the way back, so we stopped back at the Airbnb again before heading out to dinner. Katie was trying to be conservative in buying chocolate because it was expensive, but I reminded her that she will not come back home and be disappointed that we bought too much chocolate, so we bought more. edit: we should have bought more. We were a little questionable on whether or not the cheese would make it back home without spoiling. The person serving us said it should be fine unrefrigerated for a couple of days since they are hard cheese, but it still seems sketchy. The cheese was incredibly reasonably priced, and we have no idea what kind we got, but they did give us a little sample of it before we bought it so we at least know what we liked the chees we had vacuum sealed to take back home.

For dinner, we ended up going to that farm where Katie found the cat. When we saw it earlier, we had no idea that it was a restaurant. The restaurant, Hinter Musegg, is a farm-to-table restaurant that was pretty far out of the main area of the city. They didn't have much of a menu, but they did brew their own beer, and their menu was very simple where you could pick a 2, 3, 4, or 5-course meal that was the food of the day. We opted for just the 2-course meal and a few beers, and the food was fantastic. I had a meat salad to start, which was just cold (cooked) beef in some kind of sauce, and Katie had an apple and walnut salad which was shredded apples and walnuts with a light dressing. Then for the main course, we got a vegetable strudel with a chicken bratwurst. The vegetable strudel was so delicious and refreshing since we've been eating pretty poorly this whole trip. We sat on the patio right next to the farm animal cages, and we even had a few chickens visit us at the table while we were eating. I don't know how authentically Swiss it was, but the whole experience felt like a very genuinely traditional meal.

We went to Mount Pilatus today. The journey started off with a 9:30 boat ride to Alpnachstad that took about 60 minutes. But before getting on the boat, we figured we'd have plenty of time to get some coffee and breakfast plus go to the grocery store to pick up some for a picnic on Pilatus, but everything is closed on Sundays here. So we walked to a grocery store that said it was open based on the house listed on their window, but they were closed. A nice person on the sidewalk told us the only grocery store open right now would be at the train station, just a few blocks away, so that's where we headed. We went into a coffee and pastry shop chain and got some coffee and pastries for breakfast, and then when to the grocery store for a loaf of Zopf bread and some dried meats for our lunch. One thing we wish we had brought with us was a small backpack to carry lunch foods and water around, but we didn't have that so we bought a reusable grocery bag that was pretty nice and easy to walk around with. With our lunch food and full from our quick breakfast, we were ready to hop on the boat.

Once getting off the boat, we took the steepest cogwheel train in Europe up to the top of Pilatus. That train ride took a half hour and was pretty busy, but they didn't pack us on the train so I appreciated that. The views along the train ride were fantastic and seemed like something out of a movie.

We got to the top of Pilatus around noon and spent the next 3 hours wandering around the top including eating lunch. It was quite cold up at Pilatus, but not unbearable as long as the wind wasn't blowing hard. There were certain parts of the mountain that were really windy and some parts that were not. After walking about a mile on a very cold and windy hike, we went into the gift shop and food court building to try and get out of the wind where we ate out bread and sausage. The Zopf bread, which is a traditional loaf of bread in Switzerland, was decent but seemed undercooked. some of the sausages were pretty good, but we bought 3 different kinds just in case one wasn't that great, and it's a good thing we did since we barely took a bite out of one of them because of its texture and taste. After lunch, we hiked up a different trail that didn't have any wind at the top, and I was wishing we would have know about that so that we could have eaten up there instead of being inside, but that's okay, we still enjoyed the top, just not for a picnic.

I enjoyed that there were tons of different trails you could walk on, however, the two we really wanted to do were closed. But that's okay, we still got some fantastic views. Even though it wasn't the clearest of days, we could still see pretty far and much better than the day before or even after we had gotten back down (just based on looking at the webcams).

We took a gondola back down which stopped in Frakmuntegg. We hopped off the gondola where we stopped to change gondolas. At the Frakmuntegg stop, they had an Alpine slide, and we decided to give it a shot. It was only 9 Franc each which seemed like the most reasonably priced thing in Switzerland. Katie has never been on an Alpine slide before, so it was well worth it to see her get to speed down the mountain and she had a lot of fun doing it. It started raining shortly after we got off the Alpine slide, which is good because they close the Alpine slide during rain. We took the last gondola down and took a bus from Kriens back to Lucerne.

Overall, I think Pilatus was really worth it. The price for the round-trip ticket was a little over 100 Franc each, which seemed reasonable for a whole day of fun for what we got. Especially compared to the trip to Jungfraujoch which was still really cool, but seemed overly priced for what it was.

We got back into Lucerne pretty late, but that didn't stop us from having one more cheese dinner before leaving Switzerland. Our dinner was Raclette, which is literally just Raclette cheese melted that you eat with pickles. I think I like fondue better because there's a little more depth of flavor from multiple kinds of cheese, but Raclette is an interesting chees because it has a pretty offputting smell but doesn't taste anything like how it smells. The Raclette was served as a plate filled with melted cheese, but we saw some other restaurants serving it as a block of cheese with a heater that you would scrape the cheese off as it melts. I think it would have been cooler to have gotten it as a block of cheese under a heater, but the Raclette was still pretty good regardless.

Our flight didn't leave too early from Switzerland, so we had a nice relaxing morning, got some good coffee at cafe Nord, and hopped on the 9:30 train to Zurich. Nothing too exciting happened on the journey to Rome, but it was a full day of travel with us not getting to our Airbnb until around 4 pm. Dispute being on the 5th floor, we didn't have any good views, which was disappointing since our Hotel was right next to the Colosseum. We nearly died making it up the 5 flights of stairs carrying all of our luggage, and then we struggled to get the door unlocked because the lock was a little bit sticky. The apartment did have a tiny elevator, but I'm not even sure one of us would have fit in it with our luggage.

We relaxed a little bit and then started thinking about dinner. We wanted to make it to the other side of town to get some dinner since I heard good things about the food in the Trastevere area, and we settled on a place called Dar Poeta that had freshly made pizza. The walk was long and hot, but luckily there was a breeze so it wasn't too terrible. The weather on this trip had been pretty mild and on the chillier side until we got to Rome, where we were hit with heat that we were not prepared for. Once we got to the restaurant, we ordered a liter of wine and some pizzas. While the pizzas were really delicious, we weren't that impressed with the wine.

After dinner we made our way back into the center of Rome to check out the Pantheon and the Trevi Fountain. The Pantheon was closed by the time we got there, and the Trevi Fountain was as packed as I remember it being the last time I was in Rome.

The sun was getting low so we planned to grab a bottle of wine at a grocery store and head to the Terrazza del Pincio, a park on top of a hill with good views overlooking the city. Our wine options were pretty limited because we didn't have a bottle opener and the grocery store that we stopped at had a limited selection of wine that was in a refrigerator. Still, we settled on a bottle of Prosecco and headed to the park. The sun was getting lower and lower as we made our way to the park and the sun had already set by the time we got there, but I still managed to take a couple of photos, and then Katie and I sat on a bench to drink our wine. We didn't like the wine because it was too carbonated to really hard to drink out of the bottle, but we drank a little bit of it while we watched the sky turn from pink to black.

Despite it being a rest day, I set a record for the most steps in a day, this time surpassing the 23,000 that we did on our "rest day" in London for a new high record of 25,000 today. It's ironic that our rest days have become days where we're walking around more than any of the other days on the trip.

We didn't have any real plans for our first day in Rome. Our tour/tickets for the Colosseum were tomorrow, so we spent the day wandering around Rome. The morning started off with us going to the Vatican. We only went into the church and didn't do the Sistine Chapel or the museum. Neither Katie or I are very interested in that kind of thing, but I thought it was worth going into St. Peter's Basilica while we were there. When we got there around 9:30, there was already a line wrapping around the square that we had to wait in to go through security. It was quite hot, especially since we had to cover our knees and shoulders, essentially forcing us to wear pants. After waiting about 30 minutes, we got in and walked around a little bit. The inside of the church was pretty magnificent and very open. We did our best to try and take some cool photos and then we left. On the last trip that we took together (to the East coast), we both bought wide-angle lenses which were immensely handy for this trip, including inside St. Peter's Basilica. Even with the wide-angle lenses, we needed more. But hopefully, the photos do some justice as to how large the inside of St. Peter's Basilica.

After that, we headed back to the Airbnb to rest up a little bit. We've done that now two days in a row to try and escape the hottest part of the day. We went to a nearby restaurant for lunch (Trattoria Luzzi) and again order some of the house wine. This time it was a lot better wine, and we're glad that we got it. The food was okay, I got ravioli and Katie got Cacio e Pepe. It wasn't my favorite food on the trip but seemed pretty authentic. After resting up a couple more hours in the Airbnb we headed out to continue wandering the streets of Rome.

We stopped by the Pantheon but couldn't go in because Katie was wearing a tank top (and since the pantheon is a church, you have to have your shoulders covered). But that's okay, we got some gelato that was the biggest portions while we were here, then continued on to do some shopping. We shopped along the via del Corso but didn't find anything good. Katie did get a pair of flip-flops for the beach at our next destination, Cyprus, but there weren't any good-looking clothing for reasonable prices, so we didn't end up getting anything else.

We stopped by a restaurant that serves wine and cheese, and even though we weren't in the cheese capitol of the world anymore, we got a small plate of cheese and a glass of wine. We tried different wine and Katie liked here's a lot (mine was decent too). We paid our bill and got a bottle of the wine Katie was drinking to go, and went back up to the same park on the hill that we went to the night before. Unlike the previous night, we got to the park before sunset and enjoyed our bottle of wine waiting for the sun to go down. Once the sun was down, we took the metro back to our Airbnb, dropped off our stuff, then wandered over to the Colosseum to do some night photography. The Colosseum has too harsh of lighting in the daytime and since the Colosseum was so close to our Airbnb we figured we'd go out one more time today to take some photos.