Bern: Day 18

Monday morning we left Interlaken and headed towards Bern.  My side of the family has a lot of ancestors from Switzerland, some from that region.  We stopped into a town 15 minutes outside Bern called Bolligen, where the Keiner line is from.  (They lived there as far back as the 1600's!)  Christian Kener (the grandfather of my Grandma Hatch) grew up there before emmigrating to the United States and getting baptized.  As far as I can tell, his sister and her husband were baptized in that area in 1869 before moving to Utah.  That's probably how Christian heard about the church.  Anyway, the history is a bit exciting, but the town wasn't.  We went to the cemetery to see if anyone we were related to was buried there, but we couldn't find any headstone older than 100 years.  We made Jeff use his German to talk to some people who were also at the cemetery, and we found out that old graves are dug up to make room for the next generation.  All the bodies go to a central place.  And records are kept at the city hall, which wasn't open.  So much for a new discovery.

Amie walking through the cemetery.

Random building in Bolligen.

Bern had a bit more to offer, but was not nearly as big as I was expecting!  In fact, there are virtually no tall buildings or downtown area as you would expect in a country's capital.  It felt much smaller than the other tourist towns we'd visited on our trip.

 The first thing we checked out was the bear pit, since Bern is named after the bear.  Along the rivers edge they've built an enclosed area with a handful of brown bears wandering around.

  After the bears, we walked the cobble-stone streets just taking in the city.  We visited the house where Einstein lived at the beginning of his career.  It's a small museum, and they showed a good video about his life.  Wasn't much of a family man, and he ended up marrying his cousin, and has a child that was given up for adoption.  I came away with a greater understanding of his scientific contributions, but also realizing that his personal life was kind of messed up.

We didn't stick around as long as planned, and passed by the LDS temple on our way to Solothurn, one of the towns where Jeff served on his mission.  It's a quaint Baroque town.  We ate good gelato, saw some old buildings, a river, and the church, then headed back to the car.  While eating lunch we decided to cut our trip short by a night and head back to Vilseck that afternoon, instead of the next morning, and save on the price of a hotel.

It felt GREAT to be home-sweet-home.