Day 4: Mt. Rigi

The morning we climbed Mt. Rigi we got up early.  We went to the boat that would take us to Mt Rigi – the boat ride was amazingly scenic, even more beautiful than we expected and our expectations were high!  There were tons of snow-capped mountains in the distance, such as the Alps and we could see Mt Rigi and Mt Pilatus looming over us.  To top it all off, the weather was beautiful.  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky (well, almost).  When we got to the Vitznau, we waited and then got on the train.   The train was amazing!  It had open windows, so I was afraid we could fall out the windows as we went up.  It was really steep and was at something like a 50% angle, which is very steep!  The views as you went up were breathtaking.  You could see the mountains even closer than before and you could also see the whole of Lake Lucerne with all the mountains surrounding it, which was completely WOW.  You could see the people who live up on the mountain, near the top, and that was really cool.  At one stop, we saw a young boy in a traditional Swiss outfit carrying eggs.  He got on the train and we thought he was maybe bringing eggs to someone who lived closer to the top.  It was really cool imagining someone whose life was so different than ours.

We got to the top, which had even the best views of all.  I felt like I was on top of the sky!  We walked over to this huge antennae radio tower thingy and climbed it to the highest point we could get to, which was the highest point of Mt Rigi, which I found pretty cool.  We had a picnic snack at the top, on some green grass which was covered with pretty flowers, and an amazing view of all the Alps.  Suddenly we heard this loud but beautiful noise and we turned and saw these two people playing the longest horns you’ll ever see – really!  They were like 15 feet long!  They played some somber pretty songs, which sounded like we were at a funeral.  We found out later that these instruments were called alphorns. We hiked down Mt. Rigi for a while, until we got to our next stop with a restaurant and a playground. At the playground, they actually had a trampoline!  It seemed really weird and cool to jump on a trampoline on top of a big mountain in Switzerland.  We jumped on the trampoline for a bit, ate lunch on the deck, and jumped some more.

Then we hiked some more for a long-ish time, until we got to the cable car place. There was a few fast downhill spots on it- those were fun. We left Mt. Rigi and got back on our boat to Lucerne. We stumbled on big festival, with ethnic food and kid games with stilts, a weird bouncy ball thing, and an awesome but REALLY weird ball contraption thingy. We had dinner at La Bonne Cave, a nice restaurant. It was a great, fun-filled day!

On the boat to Mt. Rigi.

Here is a house near the top of the mountain where people lived.

The top of Mt. Rigi!

We thought this was a funny sign -- how do you say "mmhhh"?   "Mmm-huh?"  And what is "lecker"?