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| Entering Matt, still within the canton of Glarus. (Speed limit 40 km/hr in red circle) |
10 or so miles from downtown Glarus lies the small villages of Matt and Elm. These two villages are where Anna and Anton, Libbie's maternal ancestors met and married. Anton was from Elm and Anna from Matt. The two villages are within site of each other, separated by only about a half mile. Our first stop was Matt. Some family history documents note that Anna and Anton met and walked between the towns to visit each other.
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| Downtown Matt |
Matt consists of primarily a church, a few buildings and a bus stop. We made use of the bus stop since it offers a few paved parking spaces on the main road. The bus shelter can be seen on the right and a bench on the opposite side of the street with bus stop sign. Parking the car in the little parking area we got out and walked around a little. The bus map posted in the shelter gives a good idea of where we are in relation to Glarus. Matt and Elm can be seen on the route to the lower right.
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| Matt and Elm are on the purple route in the lower right corner of this map |
In typical Swiss fashion, the buildings have their requisite flower boxes and even the bus stop parking area is landscaped by beautiful border beds of flowers.
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| Flower beds bordering bus stop parking space |
Next stop for us was the little town of Elm, visible down the street. The little church is in Matt but a grocery store is in Elm which also has a gondola station taking people to the Tschinglen-Alp recreation area.
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| Elm, Glarus Canton |
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| A grocery store with local cheese, bread and other fixins for our picnic lunch |
Elm is a little larger than Matt, but not by much. We had a delightful conversation with a Swiss lady working behind the cheese counter in the local grocery. She asked what kind of cheese we wanted, we replied Swiss cheese. She informed us they were all Swiss cheese. Oh well, stupid Americans. Of course all the cheese in Switzerland is Swiss.
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| Swiss Cheese |
We sampled a few slices and selected some cheese to purchase. When asked about the Stauffcahers the lady told us "oh no, there aren't any Stauffachers here. They're all in Matt." Pretty funny since you can see Matt down the road but THIS is Elm.
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| Elm, Switzerland |
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| Beautiful hillside in Elm, Switzerland where we had a picnic lunch |
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The road out of Elm/ We chose to drive over the mountain top which was an adventure in itself
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While in Elm we pulled over into a little gravel parking area and had our picnic lunch. We watched a gondola going up to the mountain top taking local recreation goers to the Tschinglen-Alp area where there is hiking and mountain sports. We didn't go up there. After our roadside picnic it was time to head back to Lucerne. Instead of the Autobahn we chose the path less traveled which involved a trip over the top of the Alps including over 100 switch backs. Our poor little rental car climbed and climbed. When we went above the snow line Libbie asked me if our car had snow tires. I don't think so. Eventually we reached a little rest area where we were able to purchase bottled water and take a break from all the switch backs. There were many, many motorcycles out today. A bike would be ideal on this winding road.
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| Climbing up the mountain was beautiful |
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| A motorcycle navigates one of the many switch backs |
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| Rest area on road over the mountain |
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| We clearly were above the snow line |
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| Nice little Swiss rest area |
We clearly had driven thousands of feet above the valley floor. Amazingly the air was rich with the clanging of bells from the Swiss cows scattered all over the hillsides.
