We had planned a lot for yesterday, because it was supposed to start raining on Thursday. Therefore we had to somehow combine our Thursday program with the Wednesday program to make the most of the sunshine that we had left. First on our list was a little bike riding. We brought our own Pedelecs (you can also rent them here) and the trailer for the kids, cause we had heard that the area around Mittenwald was supposed to be full of bike trails. I had already found a nice round trip on our new old favorite Komoot app, that in the end presented us with some challenges. But more about that later.
We planned a little round trip from Mittenwald to the Lautersee, Ferchensee and the small village Elmau and back again to Mittenwald. The first challenge we had was right at the beginning. The hill we had to go up was so steep that not even our pedelecs were strong enough to get us up the hill, not even in the turbo mode. Especially Michael’s bike with the trailer and Nate in it wasn’t able to go all the way up. The next problem was that we didn’t have a pushing aid on our bikes, that would help us push our bikes up the hill. That’s why I gathered all my strength to push my bike with Noam sitting in the back up so that I could walk back down to help Michael push his bike and the trailer with Nate sitting in it upwards, too. We almost wanted to give up and drive back home. I’m so glad we didn’t. The two lakes, the small river and beautiful landscape were absolutely worth the effort.
At the end we even got to ride downhill on a bumpy single trail. Michael was really happy about that and it also couldn’t get fast enough for Nate. As a newbie and with Noam sitting behind me I was a little bit of a chicken and I got off the bike a couple of times and pushed it downhill.
Back in Mittenwald we drove straight to the valley station of the Karwendel cable car. That’s where we left our bikes and took the gondola up the Karwendel mountain. The Karwendel is the mountain with the second highest cable car in Germany, after the Zugspitze. Originally we had planned to walk back down. But since we only had half a day left (having spent the morning biking, something that had been planned for Thursday) we settled for lunch and walked along the panoramic trail on top of the Karwendel. It was supposed to be an easy path, suitable for children. But we found it quite challenging due to the many (loose) rocks and definitely not suitable for little children. If this had been any other hike we just would’ve put Nate in the carrier and that would’ve been the end of that. But this time we didn’t bring it – we had gotten there by bike and we couldn’t have brought it along, even if we had wanted to. So Nate had no other choice than to walk the 0.88 ml long loopback trail, secured by our trusted leash as the drops on either side of the path were quite steep.
So a lot of kicking and screaming on Nate’s part was met with equally intense motivation (sitting on benches, finding new stones, eating Quetschies and fruit bars) from our side with the result that he really did walk the whole path on his own. At the end we had a quick look at the tunnel that would’ve been part of our downhill trail if we had taken the trail all the way back to the valley station.
This concluded our very eventful and exciting day. We don’t want to withhold a very welcome side effect of a day like that – the kids slept like rocks 🙂
