Have you ever had an experience that circulates in your mind hours or days after and you find yourself wanting to talk about it? in my case, that was my Zermatt hiking experience on the 26.09.20 which I could draw parallels back to my tandem skydiving experience in 2017.
1. First things First… Where have the blog posts been Courtney?
If you’re a follower of this platform you’ll know its been a while since I’ve written a blog post on anything outside of Music and the Thoughts With Courtney. In both cases, these pieces of content aren’t native to this platform but shared either on the inspirEnrich Instagram or the inspirEnrich Youtube channel and repurposed to fit into blog post format. The last native piece of content I put out here was an album review of PartyNextDoor’s Album PARTYMOBILE and today whilst checking the post content I felt like inspired to write something else so here it is 🙂
2. #BeyondTheBoundaries series and Travel after COVID restrictions lifts
2.1 #BeyondTheBoundaries series
So for all of us 2020 has been a very strange year, with both its positive and negatives in terms of travel and other things due to COVID-19 which has shaken the whole world up. At the peak of the lockdowns (hopefully there’s no more!) I felt prompted to reach out to a few people to share their experiences of how they were looking beyond these boundaries imposed.
2.2 Travel after COVID restrictions lifts
One thing I’d say it’s helped many of us to do (where safe of course) is to explore the trips we can take via train, car, etc instead of the long haul flights which we may have frequently done in the past.
I am based in Switzerland and have been for a few years now which means I am surrounded by areas where there are Lakes, Mountains, and a ton of greenery with great sights. The thing is, with the exception of the most obvious places like Interlaken (great for skydiving read this ), Geneva, Basel, and Luzern most of this I’ve never seen. I’ve never really thought ah I must look to go to see so and so mountain. It’s more been a case of ah there’s plenty of time for that and I’ll go if there’s an event there I like or I’ll get round to it after this holiday, but COVID-19 changed that.
A few of the places visited this year include Konstanz(Germany), Liechtenstein (Austria / Switzerland) one of the smallest countries in Europe, Maienfeld (Switzerland) popular location to see Heidi’s House, and most recently Zermatt (Switzerland).
3. Why Hiking?
The two most common thing I’ve found Swiss people to talk about is Skiing and Hiking and up to last Saturday, I’d experienced neither of them! Why? I’d say it was a concoction of procrastination and lame excuses to be put bluntly. Therefore, on my goals list coming into 2020 both of those sat there, and as I talked to friends we started to work out the logistics of how we could have an activity weekend in the late summer.
4. Why Zermatt?
Zermatt was never in the original plan of places to go to, for a matter of fact the original plan was to go to Flumserberg but due to some other factors which escape me now, we changed it. After looking through a few things to do in Zermatt offseason for of typical skiing we opted to do Hiking.
We all woke up bright and early on a Saturday morning to travel out from our Airbnb in Randa towards Zermatt fully equipped in hiking boots and layers on top of layers of clothing in what felt like around -2c.
4.1 The 5 Lakes Hike and The Key Takeaway
Following some Italian food fuel, we headed up the cable cart into the snow ascending onto our 25km ish 5 Lake Hike. This hike provided some great views of the Matterhorn (see your Toblerone chocolate), Lakes and Greenary but that was not the key takeaway.
The key takeaway couldn’t be captured in still images or videos as this hike was very much a test of mental resilience in cold conditions, Grit breathing 2000 feet above sea level at times, and overall focus to think but not to overthink.
I would personally recommend it to everyone to do with friends, family colleagues, or partners as not only a personal development practice but also to get to know each other more. It’s in experiences like this you see that the only way to move forward is to move forward!
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