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Left SFO with Al Baldini June 12th, and after a too long flight met Dave Lee in the airport in Frankfurt June 13th, staggered to the train and headed for Basel, Switzerland. Transferred in Basel to a train to take us to Gossau, near St. Gallen in Northeastern Switzerland some 20 miles south of the German border at the Bodensee. Gossau was to be our base for the next three weeks - a great non-tourist town at the head of a local train that ended at our usual destination for flying at Wasserauen after a delightful one hour trip through the lovely Swiss countryside. And why all this effort?

The left arrow above is the end of the train ride at Wasserauen, which deposits you at the Northeast end of a long, deep valley between Ebenalp/Santis on the North and Alpsiegl on the South. It is a pretty convenient layout, with train station, an outdoor cafe right by train station, LZ a hundred yards southwest, with a hotel/outdoor restaurant at the southwest end of the LZ, and the tram station to the Ebenalp launch (right arrow above) directly across the street from the train. We all agreed this layout was pretty civilized:

So you get off the train, get a landing ticket from an instructor at the LZ, truck on back to the lift station and get your reduced-price fare ticket for 10 trips up, and head for the Ebenalp launch: (L-R Penguin, Al, Dave) {Lee Photo}

Our basic plan was to fly from the Ebenalp launch to the tower at Santis at the end of the valley - six plus kilometers horizontal and some 4000 feet vertical - from the 4100 foot launch to the 8500 foot Santis peak. Being Europe, there was, of course, a nice hotel and outdoor restaurant within 500 yards of launch..

There are actually three launches on the nose of Ebenalp: the primary one the three of us are standing on in the photo - which is under the red arrow on the left in the photo above, another one just downhill of the tram terminus just under the red arrow, and one on the steep slope just to the left of the hotel on top. On the weekends, even a big launch area can get crowded:

And yes, the launches really are grassy meadows with pretty flowers on them - and cows and chickens. We expected Heidi to show up any time. Check out the cabin on the edge of launch in the "Crowd" photo above - it is in use for the cow herders, who also keep chickens - all this within 500 yards of a hotel and outdoor restaurant where you can sit on the patio and watch pilots thermal right up over you. The locals were not kidding about the house thermal - 'cept it was the hotel thermal. And it only took a day or so to realize that getting up was not a problem:

And once you started working back up the range toward Santis, the views were just to die for: