Germany - Zugspitze 🇩🇪

We scored tickets to go up on the Zugspitze, Germany’s highest peak. The cool part was we were doing it three different ways. We started off picking the first cogwheel train in the morning from Garmish-Partenkirchen. The cogwheel is 90 years old and climbs some serious grade, most of it, in a swirling fashion inside the mountain. It was crazy, unique and fun.

The cogwheel train stops at the Zugspitzplatt. This looks like it is the center of skiing activity in the winter. The Zugsplitzplatt, is at the bottom of one of Germany’s last remaining glaciers. There were people hiking, taking pictures, tobogganing and just hanging out with a warm drink. Unfortunately, as we looked up at the Zugspitze, it was all clouded in. That’s one of the risks you take with the weather and these high mountain peaks… you just never know. You either buy your ticket ahead of time and hope for the best weather or you buy the day of and hope they are not all sold out.

We visited the small church (highest in Germany) and did a little tour of the glacier complete with a lesson about global warming and the impacts on the glaciers.

Not knowing when/if the clouds would lift, we decided to take the cable-car up the mountain. We make it to the top of the Zugspitze and this is what we saw.

I asked Cathy if she wanted to climb over and up to the golden cross and this was her response.

We wandered around the station and visited the Austrian side (since the border runs right through here). I didn’t even need to get out my passport like you used to have to do. We did a lot of other valuable things (as you can see below) while waiting and hoping that things might clear up. We finally decided to get something to eat and headed inside.

After enjoying a delicious cheese covered pretzel and an apple cake, we looked up and saw this…

In seconds it went from white out to pretty clear. Knowing things could change at any moment we sprung into action.

You’ll be happy to know that I spared you 1,398 pictures from the top of the Zugspitze. We made our way down on the big cable car, enjoying the views from the front, back and the glass floor in the middle of the car.

As we reached the cable car station we walked over to the cogwheel train to ride it back to Garmish-Partenkirchen. We had a nice relaxing ride and even got to see one of the long jump ski runs from the train.

We got lucky again. A good day and the weather cooperated.

Feldkirch

We headed out as our plans were to drive to Feldkirch, Austria and stay for the night. We stayed in a super quiet modern hotel in Feldkirch that was attached to the train station. Amazingly, we never heard the trains and we got a great night of sleep. We even got to watch interesting US shows in German, like this little bit from the “Big Bang Theory”.

A little TV after a long day is great way to wind down, but I can only take so much of this! 😄