Friday 15 August 2003. We have travelled independently from Niederau to Kitzbühel by train and rain and before lunching have decided on a bold course of action...
This is the Hahnenkamm Bahn - the station for the cable car up the Hahnenkamm mountain. The obvious thing to do in pouring rain is to try to get above it, right? Mum is strangely reluctant. It turned out she was thinking more of a chair lift than a cable car...
Once inside the tiny cabin she calms down and starts to enjoy the views.
The Hahnenkamm reaches upwards to 1,712 metres (5,617 ft) above sea level. To get a decent photo of our ascent I need to open a window and lean out a bit. Or perhaps I just poked the camera out...
Without resorting to this, the view would have been somewhat different... Somehow I don't think we are going to get above the clouds and rain!
We reach the top, where hundreds of cyclists - with bikes - are waiting to go down again. We realise that some of the cable car pods have hooks on the outside and the bicycles can be hung out to get wet whilst going up or down.
From the summit we can look across Kitzbühel to the Kitzbühellerhorn - another mountain. The Alps are full of them! In winter the Hahnenkamm hosts a race meeting for people daft enough to strap planks to their feet and shove themselves off into the snow. There are both steep downhill and slalom courses to challenge skiers and the internet is full of videos of folks coming to grief on them. Just after the start of the downhill is a drop over which they free fall for 40 metres (100 feet) landing with care not to squish themselves to half their normal height before immediately being confronted by a sharp turn to the left which they enter at some 60 miles per hour.
And that, dear readers, is why I don't strap planks to my feet...
We leave the mountain and the other members of the family leisurely get onto the first available cable car. So leisurely in fact that the pod - which doesn't stop, but just trundles around a semi-circular platform - is about to launch into space again before I just manage to leap aboard at the last moment before it leaves. We get back to Kitzbühel to find that most people have folded their umbrellas and the rain has stopped - or at least, paused. It is now time for a bit of lunch.
After that we decide to squelch our way back to the station to get the train back to Wörgle. We are stopped by the train in question crossing our path. As it's a public holiday the next train isn't running so we have an hour to wait. We decide we might as well walk along to the next station but by some strange quirk of fate we don't reach it as quickly as I thought we should and, turning the map the upside down, I realise we have been going the wrong way... About turn!
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