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From the “Top of Europe” you take a brief train ride. And you are so high up — just over two miles above sea level — that the train station doesn’t bring you all the way down to the valley floor. You take a gondola, the Eiger Express, to get you down to Grindelwald, a village of about 3,000 people that sits at 3,392 feet above sea level. You are, after all, in the Alps.
And this is what it looks like, coming down on the cable car. Enjoy.
Tomorrow, it’s all about the Olympics.
Today we hopped a train and then a gondola and then another train to the top of Europe. Jungfraujoch is the highest train station in Europe and … well, just listen to the narration in these two captivating videos.
Whoever that guy is, he can lay down a VO.
Seriously, you just don’t get quality voiceovers like that everywhere. We’re pretty lucky to have stumbled upon something of that stature for the site.
Here’s another thing about Jungraujoch. Two-plus miles of elevation is a lot of elevation. A lot, a lot. The highest elevation I’ve ever lived at is about 804 feet. Depending on the source, we currently live at 43 feet or 48 feet. (And those five feet are important, right? That’s almost a 12 percent increase.)
But up there, on Jungfraujoch, anything more than walking around can make you feel a little lightheaded. Your lips will go purple. You will measure your steps. You’ll occasionally lean on a wall. But it’s all worth it for these views.
And I could write more about the views. I could write hundreds of words. I could torture us both with poetry about them. But, instead, here are 15 photos. Enjoy.
Those views are pretty great, no? The next post will show the scenery from our way down the mountain.
We got in one of these things today. Gondolas are amazing. But let me back up.
We took a train, and then had a short walk. And then there was the meeting with a tour guide, Rolf. A curly coiffed man of chiseled stature that should have landed him on stage. Perhaps it did! But now he is here, leading this most isolated life. Meeting people for a few minutes, giving them a sticker, telling them which bus to get on, doing 11 minutes of patter on the bus, which includes several reminders to not leave things on the bus, because we aren’t returning, and then dealing with the lady who left a diaper bag on the bus. And then he directs us to those red gondolas. And then to another, larger cableway lift. At the top of the tour, he says, in his pleasant, practiced, kindly authoritative way, “We will be meeting here at 3:30 to depart at 3:45. If you have any questions I will be in the cafeteria for about half an hour.”
You wonder what he’s eating there. He brought a sack lunch. What’s he reading? Or does he just stare out the window, dreaming of after shave smells gone by?
That’s what he looks like. He looks like a man who enjoyed splashing on that smell every day. His skin looks like it looked forward to it. There’s just no other way to say it. He would have been the 45-year-old who would have been unironically cast in the part of a 30-year-old in a 1974 movie. A bit too handsome and mature for the part. And a Hai Karate aficionado. Old Spice for the really big days.
Anyway, a few of the views going up to the top of Pilatus.
The four of us walked around up there. My bride and I went on two of the outdoor walks. Her parents appreciated the views from indoors. It’s full of rich views. As rich as the lines now gaining way onto Rolf’s face, rugged and firm as the mountains themselves. Have a look. Pilatus’ highest peak is a modest 6,983 feet, but everything up there offers commanding views of Lucerne, below. The descent from Pilatus involves the Pilatus Railway, named the world’s steepest cogwheel railway. We did it in 2022 and, honestly, it was better. The cogwheel had older cars, which made the gradient — at one point, 48 percent! — feel much more adventurous. At the end of the cogwheel ride the lady caught up to her diaper bag. Rolf was the hero he’d always been meant to be. So was Eddie, the plucky young bus driver with the hip hair who should probably be on a beach and not a bus. We never saw him again. With Rolf, though, and that diaper bag, we all crossed the street from the cogwheel station at the base of the mountain and walked over to a boat. Here, we enjoyed a nice, quiet boat ride that completes what they call “The Golden Round Trip.” It’s a nice boat ride. The views are scenic. But it does feel a bit tacked on to the rest of the experience. I spent much of the time trying to stay out of the sun, and enjoying the breeze. We had dinner at a lakeside cafe. I had some German-inspired currywurst. Quite tasty. And then we caught the train back to our hotel. Whereby I marveled, as I do, at the everyday beauty of this place.
The cars were steam until the 1930s. What we rode a few years ago was from the 1970s. They were hyping the new cars on our first trip here, and something has been lost with the upgrades. It’s just another closed-air thing you can do. Then it felt — there’s not a word here, thinner, smaller, less substantial, shabbier, none of these work — like the ride itself and the machine you were on, were full of character. Now the steepness is the only character, and even that visceral feeling is mitigated by modern glass. 
What must it be like to wake up each morning and see a waterfall out your back windows? Or be surrounded by these lake and mountain views each time you come home?
The human mind has a weird capacity for adaptation, but how long would it take to get used to something like this? “Ho hum. Again. Yes, yes. It’s hilly and mountainous and rugged. But I’d enjoy a change of pace. I could sure use some flat.”
I wonder if that every enters into the minds of the locals. It will surely come to my mind tomorrow. We’re riding bikes!
Last meeting of the school year today. An informal thing. A small celebration. A planning session. An AI conversation. A gabfest. It was an afternoon of chatting and fun, not work. But it’s the last thing on the calendar for a bit.
So we celebrate. Inspired by the collective encore of Sunday night’s show, I give you, the summer of singing in no particular key.
Now, let us summer!
It was coincidental timing that we saw Barenaked Ladies on Sunday. They were the headliner of the concert I’ve been touching on this week. And they, of course, did their modern version of Brian Wilson. Today, of course, came the news that the legendary musician Brian Wilson had died. It was not BNL’s best sound of the night, frankly. Then again, it’s not Ed Robertson’s song. (Every time I see them I think, Maybe this will be the night Steven Page strolls out from stage left … )
BNL is still a fine band, and they put on a nice show, that one is just off a bit. The live shows were always better with Page, but you understand why they parted ways in 2009. Anyway, here’s Page fronting Brian Wilson for BNL.
As a gag, Brian Wilson covered BNL’s song about Brian Wilson.
Some years back, Wilson talked about a song, and a sound, to which he aspired:
Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys estimates that he’s heard “Be My Baby,” by the Ronettes, more than 1,000 times. The very first listen, 50 years ago this month, still haunts him.
“I was driving and I had to pull over to the side of the road — it blew my mind,” Mr. Wilson said, repeating a story that has become something of a legend. “It was a shock.” Just 21 and already frustrated with his band’s basic surf music, he bought the single and set about deconstructing its arrangement and production.
“I started analyzing all the guitars, pianos, bass, drums and percussion,” he said by telephone. “Once I got all those learned, I knew how to produce records.”
Those records, many fans would contend, weren’t half bad, but if you ask Mr. Wilson, they still don’t stack up.
“I felt like I wanted to try to do something as good as that song and I never did,” he said. “I’ve stopped trying.” Mr. Wilson added: “It’s the greatest record ever produced. No one will ever top that one.”
You know it; it’s Phil Spector, Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry. It’s the Wrecking Crew, a wall of sound. It’s 18-year-old Veronica Bennett in those resonant Gold Star Studios.
My favorite will forever be.
Another bit of coincidental timing: as I write this, there’s an insurance commercial on using a brassy instrumental version of Good Vibrations as bed music. That song turns 60 next year.
Update: Some years back, BBC radio brought together a tremendous sequence of performances to celebrate another of Wilson’s brilliant pieces of art, and a classic song of our era.
