Mt. Pilatus

When our friends Nikhil and Ashwini were here, they described a trip that they'd taken to Mt. Pilatus, the mountain that looms to the south of Luzern. Dennis and I thought it sounded pretty fantastic, and figured if we're going to go, we'd better do it while the weather is still fair.

Mt. Pilatus is named after Pontius Pilate. According to legend, a little lake on the mountain is his final resting place, and it is said that Pilate's ghost used to rise each year on Good Friday, washing the blood of Christ from his hands. And it was said that causing the slightest ripple in this haunted lake would result in devastating thunderstorms. But the late 1500s, people ceased fearing the cranky ghost, and the villagers  led by a brave local priest, decided to drain his lake to banish him and his bad weather for good. Only 400 years later, in 1980, did people think to allow the lake to re-form.  

Starting at Zürich's Hauptbahnhof: we made the kids
carry their weight today.  Joey was carrying about 25
little books in his bag, contrary to my advise.

Apparently, the poor people of the mountains also had to contend with dragons: there are several vivid accounts written in the 1400s and 1500s of dragons flying about the mountain and having contact with the locals. Apparently, these dragons were considered friendly, and at one point a pair of the mountain's dragons spent several months nursing a local cooper back to health when he got injured and trapped after climbing too high on Mt. Pilatus. 

Unfortunately, the dragons must have been abroad today: we saw none, to Joey's particular disappointment.  He spent a good half-hour toward the end of the trip, chanting over and over, "I wanna see dragon cave. I wanna see dragon cave."  Ella echoed my thoughts: "Huh. You'd think they could put a dragon robot somewhere, or at least a statue. Sheesh!"  We've been utterly spoiled by Switzerland.

But I'm getting far ahead of ourself, and, aside from a distinct lack of magical creature encounters, Mt. Pilatus made for a wonderful day.

Visitors to the mountain are encouraged to take a route called "The Golden Roundtrip." It takes you to, up, and over the mountain, via a bus, a train, a cog train, a gondola, a cable car, and a ferry boat.  We had to cut the 90-minute ferry out of our trip, but today we got to experience just about every other mode of transportation that Switzerland has to offer.

Our route today, more or less

The trip to Luzern is less than an hour, and from the train station we had a short bus ride to the little town of Kriens.

Dennis and Alex, reviewing our itinerary for the day

The first two legs were in a little aerial gondola that just barely fit our whole family. That took us as far as the treeline of the mountain, a trip of about twenty-five minutes.  Halfway up, however, we got to hop out at the Krienseregg way station, where they have the most amazing public playground called PiluLand.

Pausing for a photo before dashing off to play.  You can see the gondolas on the right, and the mountain in the
background is Mt. Pilatus. We went all the way up to the top of the little jagged point in the center of the mountain.

Another view of the playground, with an open fire right in
the middle of all of the play equipment. Ummm...why not?

A long slide, which Dennis and I
rode from the restaurant down
the hill to the playground.

Aside from a few scout troops, this stop of the mountain was pretty quiet. And the playground was right downhill from a restaurant that had just opened for lunch. All together, it seemed like our best bet for a peaceful meal for today: we suspected restaurants would only get more expensive and more crowded, the further we got up the mountain.  And this way, the kids could return to the playground as soon as they finished their Kindertellers. S

o I went ahead and grabbed us a table on the patio with a perfect view of the mountain and playground, both.

Cheers to you, from me and Joey

But we didn't reckon on the wasps, which have ruined more than one outdoor lunch for us this year.  The wasps were drawn to Joey's juice-sticky chin.  He wasn't afraid of them, but he inadvertently squeezed one when it tickled his chin, and the wasp stung his face.

So much for the view.

We moved inside, but unfortunately the pests followed us, and Dennis and I spent the rest of our lunch grimly trapping more and more wasps under used juice cups.  But when we weren't exterminating, the food made up for the nuisance.  I finally got around to trying a famous regional dish, zürcher geschnetzeltes, which is a sort of veal in a creamy sauce, served, as is tradition, with rösti, or fried potatoes.  It might be the best food I've eaten all year.

There was a little dwarf tunnel under the playground,
the kids' favorite feature.

Alex, popping up out of the dwarf tunnel

Ella and Alex took their little brother down to the playground while Dennis and I finished our lunch and then took the slide down to join the kids. We even got a chance to take a couple of rides on the zip line before the kids spotted us and demanded a turn, too.

The kids could have stayed much longer, but we lured them back onto the gondolas to the next stop, Fräkmüntegg, home of the longest summer toboggan run in Switzerland.

The longest Rodelbahn in die Schweitz

For some reason Ella finds these roller toboggan runs very scary, so she curled up on a lawn chair with her book while Dennis and I took the boys on a round trip. Because Alex is hell on wheels, I smoothly negotiated to have Joey as my Rodelbahn partner.  He was perfectly happy to take the ride at a sane pace, slow enough to wave at the cows on the way down. To get back up, they attached the rear of our sled to a ski tow, which pulled us slowly backwards up the mountain, back to Ella.

Strangely, as adamant as Ella was about skipping the Rodelbahn, she desperately wanted to try the Seilpark, the high ropes course.  At eight, she's must barely old enough, and I'll grant you that Dennis and I would have both loved to take her, but it would have taken much to long to go through the safety training course and then to negotiate the course.

Flying through the Alps

But there seems to be one of these ropes courses in every ski resort in the summer: something to draw in the tourists and bring in a little off-season revenue. Playgrounds aren't just for kids here. So if she's really desperate to go, we can always try to squeeze in a trip this fall.

From Fräkmüntegg, we took a large-capacity cable car for a little 5-minute ride up to Pilatus Kulm, the top of the mountain, at 7000 feet. It's the sort of car that they usually pack nose-to-ear, but luckily there were only about ten of us in there.

The cable car

Ella, rhapsodizing about the view from the cable car

Off the cable car, once our eyes had adjusted to the bright, bright sunlight, we began to focus: Dennis and I on the stunning view, and the kids on the ice cream that they'd been promised.

We managed to distract them for a moment with watching some para-gliders jump off the mountains.  Just a few steps forward, and their chute would fill and lift them far up above the top of the mountain. Once up there, the gliders would steer themselves around and around the peaks of the mountain, waving at all of us tourists, leaning over the rails to video them.

The kids loved how this guy was letting out whoops of joy
as he sailed around us.

Joey was really into his treat.

The temperature wasn't supposed to get above 70 today; especially on top of the mountain, we expected chilly weather. But it was positively hot up there, especially with the day's brilliant sunshine. So Dennis and I joined the kids in some ice cream.

But we had a good reason for getting some sugar into the kids: Dennis and I wanted to climb to the top of point Esel, which is just a few feet shy of being the highest point on Mt. Pilatus.

I gave the kids a few extra chocolates to help
them reach the top.  Toblerone seemed like
an appropriate mountain-climbing snack.

Dennis was all set to carry Joey and his twenty-five books to the top of Esel, but Joey has been a real momma's boy, lately.  "I want yooooou," he calls, reaching out his arms.  Unfortunately, he also wanted his books.  It was not the hike I'd bargained for.

I wasn't sure we'd make it, so Dennis and the other kids tripped ahead, Ella and Alex distracted from the climb with counting stairs.

On his way

We climbed that!

And Joey and I took it at a slower pace, smiling wanly as people on their way down chuckled knowingly at us.  But I'm incredibly stubborn: have I mentioned that? And a good thing. I'd have hated to miss this:

A few minutes before we left the top of Esel, a quartet of Alpenhorn players started playing down below, quite completing the experience.

The trip back down was much easier, but Joey was still monkey-clinging to my neck.  To get the rest of the way down the mountain, we'd be taking a cog train, the steepest in the world, they say.

But those ran infrequently, so we stalled a little by taking the kids on the Dracheweg walk, a flat hike around the Oberhaupt peak, mostly carved out of the side of the mountain.

This is the point when Joey started complaining about not seeing dragons, although there were many placards telling of the legends of dragon sightings and encounters on Mt. Pilatus.  Dennis tried to convince him that any number of little alcoves were dragon caves, but Joey would have none of it.

He was tired, he was disappointed, and it was time to go.

As it was for most of the population on top of Pilatus Kulm, apparently, but we managed to get in line for the cog train early enough to snag some of the last remaining seats on the next train down.

The cog trains on Mt. Pilatus

 Joey fell asleep in Dennis's arms before we even boarded. Alex surprised me by curling up and snoozing on my lap. And Ella, tired, too, from a day of excitement, just wanted to read her book. So that left Dennis and me to enjoy the descent as we liked.

We spent much of the trip talking with our seat mate, an older German man with a great sense of adventure, who was taking this trip and visiting several other cities in Switzerland on his own, and seemingly loving every moment, goofy in his enthusiasm. Not for the last time, I'm sure, I cursed myself for not speaking better German (although Dennis helped me out when I got mired too deeply).  He was definitely my kind of people.

A steeply inclined car

Now Joey lets Daddy carry him.

After the cog train, we still had three more trains to take before we got to our front door, but we basically surrendered for those, letting the kids watch Smurfs, while Dennis and I finished off our thermoses of coffee and enjoyed an hour's quiet. They'd earned a break, and so had we!