Grady's Excellent Adventure

Since today was a holiday (with warm, sunny weather), Grady and I took a road trip up to the Alps. We drove a couple of hours to Lauterbrunnen, parked the car, then took a train up to the ski town of Wengen. It was Grady's first train ride (ever!), and all things considered he did pretty well (other than occasionally hitting the lady across from me, who was breast-feeding her baby at the time, with his wagging tail). When we got to Wengen I was starving so we went to an outdoor restaurant--another first for him. He barked at me a few times and kept trying to sniff the waitresses when they walked past, but he was pretty good-natured about the whole thing, especially since all he got out of it was a little taste of my rösti. We went for a hike and it was gorgeous; this is a view from Wengen:



While waiting for the train back to Lauterbrunnen, I had to go to the bathroom but didn't want to leave him outside on his own (you never know when some rogue St. Bernard will come around looking for trouble) so I took him down with me and I think he terrified the poor guy who was already in there (he went in before me and was basically standing against the wall still zipping his pants when I left). That's the sort of thing I hadn't thought about when I decided to take him to the mountains with me--oh well, live and learn. Anyway, we took the train back down and it wasn't crowded so Grady hopped up to enjoy the view:



When we got back to Lauterbrunnen we walked to Staubbach Falls but at that point we were pooped so after loading up on caffeine (me, not him) we made the drive back. I'm very proud of him--he's still no Swiss dog and he never will be that well-behaved, but it kinda felt like our boy did a little growing up today...