Made a beautiful breakfast of fresh bread, cheese, tomato and avocado. A light rain was falling. We headed out for Rigi Mountain. Rigi is a significant prominence which rises right out of the water. There is a picturesque village at the base called Weggis. We parked at the base of the gondola and took it halfway up.
Then we proceeded by foot on the Rigi Kulm Trail. The mountain trail is a fairly steep climb but is serviced by the tram as well as a couple of cogwheel trains.
There are several trains that go to the top of Mt. Rigi.
There are amenities everywhere - little cafes, bars, even hotels and churches. They make the trek as pleasant as possible. It took a couple of walking, resting and photo ops to finally make our way to the top. Cows were grazing contentedly in the meadows. The sound that their cowbells made was as lovely as the pastures that they were grazing in.
All along the way it was fun to chat up our fellow hikers. People were there from the U.S., South Korea, Germany and France. Fortunately almost everyone spoke English. We made it to the top. It was quite cool and breezy and after getting some classic panoramas, I needed to head down to warmer temps. There was a cute little coffee shop nearby so we stopped for coffee and very tasty apple cake. At the top also was a small open air arena of sorts. It was circular and had seating along the sides. We were curious as to what type of sport might take place here until I looked down the hill and saw an enormous mural on the wall of a building of a couple of guys doing some sort of wrestling.
We wanted to take a different path down and followed a second rail line. It was quite steep at the top.
Accompanying us in the valley below was a tinkling herd of dairy cows, headed for home. After a rough initial descent, the trail crossed the tracks and turned into a smooth gravel road. By now it was 6:30 or so and time for us to make time to the gondola. The walk was gorgeous, high up on the mountainside overlooking the lake. In the distance we could hear thunder and could see fog and rain below us. We hustled to beat the weather and made it to the second to the last car down. It was raining when we got to the bottom.
The view on the way down.
We found a cool restaurant near the lake aptly named “Oliv”. It had just stopped raining and a gorgeous rainbow appeared over the lake. We were sitting at an open air restaurant just across the street from the water.
We had a gregarious waiter named Enrico who’s first comment, hearing that we were Americans, was “Oh, so you like Trump!”. That of course got a rise out of us. Had a nice pizza, fish and chicken, local beers and wine and ice cream for dessert.
As we were finishing up, our waiter asked where each of us were from, started naming teams and players from NFL teams in each of our cities. Most astonishing of all, when hearing that Clay was from Iowa, was the words, “Caitlin Clark”. When we started talking about her he topped himself by declaring, on our way out, “Caitlin fucking Clark!”. I love that guy.