Weddingbee Blog

After the proposal and our lovely picnic lunch, we spent the rest of the day hiking above and around Murren.

We went up into the mountains as far as an old, decrepit, boarded-up hostel, and then turned around. We hiked back down the trail, and then walked the path from Murren down to Gimmewald, which is an even tinier village tucked into the mountain underneath Murren. We saw lots of sheep, and I may or may not have yelled at random hikers that I just got engaged. (Don’t judge.)

We took a gondola back up to Murren, and then the multitude of transportation methods back down to Interlaken. Back in our hotel room at the Metropole (a huge cement block of a thing), we drank a bottle of wine while watching the sun set. I took a million pictures of my ring, and Mr. Candy Apple read.

We couldn’t call our parents because our phones didn’t work in Switzerland so, after the bottle of wine, we made our way downstairs to access the hotel computer. We sent our parents a quick, tipsy message, which I cornily signed “The future Mrs. Candy Apple.” Gag. We also changed our Facebook statuses, which of course made the engagement official.

Although we had both traveled in Europe before (and should therefore have known better), we were in a haze of love and engagement bliss (gag again) and completely forgot that everything closes early on Sundays in Europe. Like, everything. When we went out around, oh, 7 PM, there was not a single restaurant that was open. We were splashing through the rain, I was giggling like a crazy person (Mr. Candy Apple tells me that apparently I hadn’t stopped giggling all day, like a sixth grader with a date to the dance), attempting to find some sort of food—it was like a cheesy romantic comedy gone horribly, horribly wrong.

We finally found a teensy British pub hidden almost next door to our hotel that appeared to be open. Let me tell you, this place was about the size of our tiny apartment in Cambridge. We grabbed a table (I of course was still gazing at my ring and paid no attention to what was going on around me) just in time. Once we were seated and served our measly sandwiches, a horde of loud, obnoxious American students rolled in. Yes, they took up the entire pub. Yes, they were incredibly drunk and annoying. (This is what gives us a bad name in Europe, people!!) Anyway, we spent most of the meal talking to the British couple next to us who were on a road trip to some sort of car race in the south of France.

After that, we dashed across the street to our hotel and passed out, exhausted from the exciting day. We followed that up with a funicular ride up to Harder Kulm, amazing beer and bears in Bern, Lucerne, and puttering around Basel (including the most amazing macarons EVER). An amazing, memorable trip! We are so incredibly excited about getting married—I can’t wait! Mostly I am just glad that he really is as sure about our relationship as I am and that we both are at the same point emotionally. I am so, so lucky to be marrying my best friend. (That’s three gags in one post!)

When you got engaged, how long did you wait to tell people? Did you, like me, scream it from the roof mountaintops, or did you wait and keep the good news to yourself for a while?

All photographs are my own.

By the way—wondering about the titles to these posts? I told one of my authors that I got engaged in Switzerland, and he now calls me Swiss Miss. Excellent.