If you’re ready to use buses and trains opportunities for walks and hikes open up. Yesterday’s hike, for example, was possible because we parked the cars in Marchairuz before catching a bus to Le Pont. That’s where we met another part of the group before hiking from le Pont, to the Col de Mollendruz. From here we saw the defensive Toblerones before heading back down.
I didn’t expect that the path would take us back down, lower than the road, through the trees for a while, before getting to a clearing and a parking where the smell of barbecue was present.
It’s easy to look at what people are doing and to travel two hours on a train or in a car. In practice it’s a way of exploring the local area and seeing things that you wouldn’t otherwise see. On the flipside sometimes it is nice to stay local.
I went from seeing that a hike was in Gstaad that would take two hours to get to, to seeing a hike that would take an hour to get to and participate in, to another.
I saw that there is a hike taking place nearby. I would have really liked to join it but I would have been participant eleven with a limit of ten people. I wanted to participate because it would have required walking to Nyon, and taking the train de St Cergue to St Cergue and then walking for a few hours, before taking the train back down and walking home. Both my carbon footprint and my travel time would have been small and the environment would have benefited.
On Sunday, after Saturday’s via ferrata I went for a walk along the Areuse river. The hike started in Noiraigue and went along the Areuse river and two gorges. In reality it’s one gorge but there are two parts to the gorge seperated by a long flat bit that is more friendly to people who are slightly, or quite afraid of heights.
This experience wa organised via GoSocial rather than Meetup.
I understand Meetup, GoSocial, Facebook Events and other event based social networks. The one that I don’t understand is GoSocial. It’s a social event network that has visibility on Facebook but you can’t comment, and chat rooms for Geneva, Lausanne and other places.
Instead of creating an event where everything is visible with ease, as with Glocals, Meetup.com, Facebook events and other social networks it is a pig’s breakfast of one chatroom per event, and a list that is manually updated for participation that is only visible when you’re already included within the chat when it’s updated.