Join us for a 9-day holiday trip by coach to Austria, staying at Schüttdorf, close to Zell-am-See, 12-20 August 2000. We'll be touring the sights and musical box chalets of both Austria and Germany as we venture into Bavaria and the Tyrol.
Each article can be accessed by clicking/tapping the fourteen photos below. A link on each page will bring you back here.
Monday 14 August 2000. After our morning in Berchtesgaden, we got back to the coach and motored on for another while before coming to Königsee.
We passed several of these wonderful chalet style buidings both large and small, but always exquisitely decked out in blooms of colour. We learned that the "see" part of Königsee's name meant "lake".
In the case of Königsee it was a crystal clear turquoise lake with tiny fish darting from underneath at any bread thrown to the ducks. Towering over the lake were several mountains.
We had a couple of hours free time and we had at first thought to go for a cruise on the lake.
However the long line of people who had all had similar thoughts put us off a wee bit and we stood for a while drinking in the sights and sounds. Before we found our drink though, Fran saw a notice for a cable car and we set off to find out if the queue was any less than for the boats. It was! In fact there was no queue whatsoever! The man in the kiosk told us that the car took 30 minutes to go up plus another 30 to come down again - plenty of time for us to take the trip and to spend a bit of time at the top.
So we walked through the turnstiles and got straight into a small two-person cable car which after a short pause launched us off up the mountain on the Jennerbahn. Again by way of explanation, Jenner was the name of the mountain and bahn means train or in this case a linked series of little cabins, suspended from the cable above.
The cable car was glazed with plastic and the door was locked. It very soon got boiling hot in there! The cable car opened in 1953 and due to the length of the cable (4.2km or 2.6 miles) it has to pass through a middle station where the gradient changes.
We approached, passed through, and left the middle station without any bother and the cable began to rise more steeply. The upper section of the cable was not only steeper but longer than that from the lake to the middle station.
And here we are, arriving at the top station. The Jenner mountain stands 1874m tall (6148ft) and the cable car travels 4.2 kilometers to get to the top.
The view from the top. We looked for the lake far below but were not able to spot it. Possibly because the cable car route takes a bt of a dog-leg bend at the middle station and also because the lower portion of the mountain is heavily forested.
We checked the time and decided there was plenty of time to sit and have a drink at the top of the mountain before climbing back into another oven for the journey back down!
The journey back down was as scenic if not more so than the jouney up. We had the added excitement of watching out for the lake to come into view. As we left the Jennerbahn we took a last look at the lake then back to the coach. A family of four are missing.
After half an hour they tumbled into the coach, breathless. They had been told that the boat trip would get them back in time but in fact they had had to get off at the first stop and then had to apologise and beg to queue-jump a line of 100 people to get back. "Was it worth it though?" one of the others asked. "No - we spent all the time worrying that the coach would have gone!"
Monday 14 August 2000.
There was some lovely scenery as we climed steadily upwards, but we were a little disappointed to find there was no clear view of the lake. We caught glimpses of the edge of it from time to time.
