Planes, Trains and Automobiles…and Boats, Gondolas, Buses, Trams, Funiculars, Cogwheels and Toboggans
The Essentials Newsletter, Forty-third Edition
As we do every August, my family and I just took our family vacation – the one in which we splurge a bit too much and are overly ambitious about all the things we try to see and do. While we visit with our extended family over the holidays or other times during the year, our August trip includes just us and another family with whom we’ve been friends for over a decade. Our eldest kids went to kindergarten together and our youngest kids are close in age. After taking a shortish, tentative, Disney World adventure together in 2016, we figured out that we’re “travel compatible.” What I mean by that might be obvious, but to put a finer point on it…we have similar goals for our travel, we respect each other’s opinions, we don’t get frustrated when plans change, and each family plays to our strengths in terms of how we help with the planning and execution of the vacation.
With that said, our friends’ strength is intensely detailed planning (one might say obsessive – in a good way!), so my husband and I usually don’t do a whole heck of a lot in advance of the trips except to save our money and nod our heads in agreement. Occasionally, our friends, Katie and Kyle, will ask my husband Alan and me to do one or two things to help out, but we mostly ride on their coattails.
Sometimes our two families add in short trips between the “anchor” August one, so we’ve done a lot in the last nine years – several trips to Disney World, a trip to Cancun, a stay on Jekyll Island in Georgia, a cruise to Alaska, a trip to the Bahamas, a cruise to Italy, and this year, a sweeping trip to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and northern Italy, with a quick stop in Liechtenstein. And here’s where we get to the topic at hand. Transportation. On our latest adventure, we used and appreciated many sources of transportation, and I was reminded again of how ingenious we’ve been as a species in finding ways to get people and supplies to places that seem impossible to access. Even as I write this, I sit in a comfortable, well-appointed and massive Airbus A380 owned by Lufthansa, flying across the Atlantic back to the U.S. at over 30,000 feet above sea level and going over 600 miles per hour. Nice way to be transported.
Let’s start at the very beginning of our trip (a very good place to start), where we rented an eight-passenger van in Munich, at an Avis just around the corner from the (in)famous Hofbrauhaus, which is emblematic of the beer gardens and Oktoberfests made famous in the Bavarian region of Germany. After partaking of a good meal and some even better beverages at the Hofbrauhaus, we made our way the next day to Salzburg, Austria, home of Mozart and the Sound of Music. En route to and from Salzburg, I got to drive on the Autobahn, Germany’s beautifully maintained highway system that often doesn’t have a speed limit. The irony is that the van we rented, while fitted out to fulfill European road and other requirements, was none other than a Ford. That Ford drove well – it had a great turning radius and decent pick-up for a heavier vehicle. Admittedly, I took her up to 150 km/hour (about 100/miles per hour) on one stretch of the highway and she felt great. Our friend, Katie, may have felt less than great after realizing how fast I was going! During our brief stint in Salzburg, we experienced another mode of transportation – a funicular train that operated on the side of a steep mountain, almost like an elevator. We accessed the ancient castle in Salzburg with that vehicle going at what seemed to be about a 45-degree incline.
This was to be the first of several modes of transportation that we used to access beautiful natural sites only through feats of engineering, clearly developed by the central Europeans to access the steep hills and mountains of the Alps, for a variety of reasons including access to grazing for goats, sheep and cows, access to water, and use of the terrain for natural defenses.
As we made our way from Salzburg to Fussen, Germany, we decided to name our hearty van, “Liesl van Diesel,” as an homage to the Sound of Music and the beautiful sites we had seen from that movie during our stay as well as to the type of gasoline she consumed, rather efficiently, I might add. Near Fussen, we saw a couple of incredible castles built in the 1800s by the tragic King of Bavaria, Ludwig II. One of them, Hohenschwangau, was Walt Disney’s inspiration for the original Sleeping Beauty castle at Disneyland. During this outing, we got to experience another engineering marvel – a walking suspension bridge above a high gorge overlooking the castle. We also used our own “feet” to hike and see the castle from above. The paths we took were beautiful and well-marked. Bridges are such essential elements of transportation – and their history overlaps with that of other critical infrastructure sectors such as water and power because the tolls charged by bridge operators influenced how we think of water rights and, in a related way, the hydropower harnessed from certain rivers and irrigation systems.
From Fussen, we made our way to Switzerland, with a brief detour to the “micro-state” of Liechtenstein to get our passports stamped. I had a bit of a hairy experience trying to park in the one and only parking garage in the country, but Liesl van Diesel remained unscathed, and above-ground parking was located. That morning, we had tried to access the longest pedestrian suspension bridge in the world at Ehrenberg Castle in Austria, but to no avail as the weather didn’t cooperate. We got a glimpse of it, though, and just seeing it made my heart do a little flip flop – it was high and very long.
And now onward to some of the most ingenious modes of transportation we were to come across, in the Swiss Alps. In awe of the spectacular sites – beautiful, aquamarine lakes, quaint houses surrounded by stunning green mountains, frequent waterfalls, and fluffy clouds -- we made our way in trusty Liesl van Diesel, first to Lauderbrunnen to park, then on a train up the mountain to Wengen, located near Grindelwald and Interlaken. The tracks for this particular train had “spikes” or gears in the middle to keep it steadily going up and down, not too fast or too slow, as it navigated steep, rocky terrain, and forested areas.
Wengen charmed us all, with breathtaking views of the surrounding peaks. We explored further from there, taking a gondola higher up the mountain to the top. Once to the small village of Mannlichen, we took another gondola through the mountains to Grindelwald, then another one to First (pronounced “Feerst”). I was blown away by these interlacing networks of gondolas, not all the same in form, but all intended to function similarly. Some held more people, some worked on two cables, while others had three. I loved riding the gondolas, and we learned that they often stay open in the winter, even when the trains can’t make it through the snow. They can be used to deliver food and other supplies as well as people. We saw the toboggans we rode down the mountain being hauled back up to the top.
We hiked extensively in and around these areas, noting the cow bells on the beautiful tan and white breed as well as how green it was up to the point of the snow-capped mountains.
On our way out of Wengen a couple of days later, we stopped to see mountain waterfalls that rushed together inside a mountain near Grindelwald. We took an elevator up, inside the mountain to see the falls, which were incredible. The lessons learned from creating mine shafts no doubt informed the development of this mountain elevator.
We next made our way to Lucerne, a quaint town on a lake where another bridge – the Chapel Bridge, which is a covered pedestrian bridge across the river that feeds the lake – is the oldest one of its kind, dating back to the 14th century and still standing. (Side note: I was pleasantly surprised that there was no charge to walk across the bridge!) We also went up to the famous Mount Pilatus, overlooking Lake Lucerne. En route to the mountain, we took a steamboat across the lake (kid you not), then something called a cogwheel train to get to the very top. The cogwheel train had cogs, like the spikes on the train in Wengen, but operated more like a funicular, going almost straight up, and with its cars angled to fit the angle of the mountain. The train was the first of its kind, invented in the late 1800s, while the gondolas that also traverse the mountain (and that we came down) weren’t built until the 1950s.
The next day we had to take our beloved Liesl van Diesel back to Avis in Zurich, at which point we caught a train to St. Moritz for a brief overnight stay at that playground of the rich and famous so that we could catch another train to Zermatt. Apparently, St. Moritz is great in the winter. From there, we boarded the Glacier Express train – known as the “slowest fast train” in Europe. It took us on a long journey through a different part of the Alps that felt more like the American Rockies – still breathtakingly beautiful but not as green as the Wengen, Interlaken region.
In Zermatt, we rode more trains and gondolas, so that we could see the great Matterhorn from as many angles as possible and could get some spectacular pictures of its reflection in mountain lakes. (Disney also pays homage to this mountain in a popular Disneyland ride featuring toboggans.) In Zermatt town, we rode in funky little taxis the like of which I’ve never seen before, but they were good at zipping around all the pedestrians crowding the streets there. Katie and I rented walking poles in Wengen, the better to help our very own mode of transportation and to prevent us from falling down while chasing elusive mountain sheep.
After Zermatt, we wound down our whirlwind tour by proceeding onto yet another train to Milan to see the Last Supper by Michaelangelo as well as some of the city’s other sites such as the Duomo cathedral and La Scala theater. And, finally, we spent our very last day of this transportation-laden excursion on Lake Como, in a handy wooden paneled speedboat that drove us to the key landmarks around the gorgeous, iconic mountain lake in the Italian Alps, with clear, crisp water perfect for swimming on a hot day.
With all these modes of transportation over a two-week vacation, nothing went wrong and there were no major delays. The reliability of the trains and the gondolas, in Switzerland and Germany, in particular, were super helpful because if they had not been reliable, we might have missed out on some important (read: prepaid) elements of our trip. The sheer engineering moxie exemplified by the cogwheel trains and gondolas in the mountains was also quite impressive. And the clear, open roads of the autobahn were a blast, even driving an eight-passenger Ford diesel truck named Liesl.
As for a few transportation options we didn’t partake of -- we saw a lot of bikes while hiking and walking and barely avoided being hit by some obnoxious cyclists – the Europeans apparently don’t believe in bells on their bikes, only on their cows! We forewent the horse-drawn carriages in Germany and the para-gliding in Switzerland, but it was cool watching the latter take-off on the top of Mt. Pilatus.
We also saw a lot of electric transmission lines in every country we visited, traversing some of the highest peaks and enabling all the modes of transportation we undertook in some way, shape or form – even the horse-drawn carriages had some back up power to help the horses on the steep parts. And Liesl’s diesel needed electric power for pumping. The innovations in transportation we experienced would not have been possible without it.
So, other than reliving my vacation with you all, the reason I’m sharing this amazing trip is to underscore just how vast and important transportation is to every day lives. Living in the DC area, when we drive to and from work or I carpool my kids to and from activities, it sometime is taken for granted. With so many modes taken in a short time span, this trip reminded me of the history of each and how each one underpins everything we do.