Monday, July 6, 2026

We had a big day planned, so after breakfast on Monday, we packed up all our warm clothes and headed up to Jungfraujoch. We took a train to Kleine Scheidegg (note: the STP only covers up to Wengen, and then you have to purchase a ticket from Wengen to Kleine Scheidegg, even though it’s on the same train, which I did not realize until we were asked for this ticket on the train and I had to purchase it then) and then got on the Jungfrau Railway, the highest railway in Europe. This took us up through the mountain to a location between the Jungfrau and Monch mountains, which was covered in snow. 

We went out to the Sphinx Terrace first, where we took in the views from 3751 m (that’s over 12,300 ft) up. After spending quite a bit of time here, we headed back in and then out to the Aletsch Glacier. LS and I enjoyed some hot cocoa, while Mr. Strange had a beer, then we walked downhill to the snow park, where we spent 20 minutes sledding down the hill in inner tubes. It was so much fun! They had a conveyor belt to bring people and sleds back up the hill, so you could sled as many times as you could in the 20 minutes. We made it down three times.

We returned inside and walked through an area with some history of the railway and then to the ice palace! These were ice tunnels filled with various ice sculptures, and it was fun to discover what was next.

We had to prebook our return journey down, and I had no idea how long it would take us to get through. The website says that a two hour ticket is most common, so that is what we bought, but we had already missed it by this point. We skipped the glacier plateau, since it was just another viewpoint, then went to the gift shop. We purchased some postcards and stamps and mailed them from the highest post office in Europe. There are two dropboxes, both a normal yellow Swiss Post box and a red Japanese post box, which mirrors one on Mt. Fuji. We put ours in the red post box. At the time of this writing, they have yet to arrive.