After doing some careful research to find a mountain that didn`t have a cable car or a funicular railway going up it, we eventually picked one that had a cable car going only _halfway_ up it. This mountain was Hoher Frassen, right behind our campsite. Being quite lazy sorts of people, we took that cable car, ate in the inevitable restaurant at the top and then walked up to the second restaurant (Frassenhutte), decided the top was too far, gave up and walked all the way back to the campsite. The scenery was very nice, the weather was excellent and it was great not to follow a railway all the way up. Rather disappointingly there was some sort of cable car setup at the Frassenhutte, but it appeared to be for goods rather than people. I suspect that what happens is that the cable cars are eventually declared unfit for human service and become "goods-only" ones - we saw quite a lot of these in Switzerland and I rather doubt they were built specifically to carry goods.
Right, enough of that. I`ve decided not to spend too much time on things that aren`t particularly exciting for the reader, so let`s move onto something technological and whizzy. I have a Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS device - it`s really meant for running, cycling or other such going-around-in-circles pursuits but if you wear it whilst hiking it sits there remembering where you`ve been. There`s a web page (www.motionbased.com) where you can upload these tracks, and it allows you to then export them in Google Earth format. If you don`t have Google Earth, please download and install it from http://earth.google.com/. It won`t do anything bad to your computer, I promise. Once you have it, download the file http://chrisrae.com/euroblog/nuziders.kml - this is the hike we did today. If you double-click on it (once you`ve got Google Earth, dad, that`s what the "which program do you want to use" thing means) it`ll whoosh up and show you a nice satellite picture of the map. The red line poking out to the left about two thirds of the way up is where we got the cable car - we then walked up to the hut and all the way back down to our caravan.
Now, here`s the really neat thing. Below and to the right of the up/down/left/right scrolling arrows underneath the main display is a "tilt" control. Hold down the mouse button on the lower "tilt down" icon. There you go. Either you think that`s kind of neat, or in your heart of hearts you were never really going to enjoy this computery part. Dad, the reason Google Earth is now saying you don`t have an internet connection is because you unplugged that funny grey box to plug in a light to find your spectacles to read this.
If you thought that was at least vaguely interesting, try http://chrisrae.com/euroblog/kleinescheidegg.kml , which is the walk we did the other day just under the north face of the Eiger. Also, try clicking on View..Play Tour (or pressing F10) and you`ll see the exact path we took. I`ve no idea how to change the zoom/tilt on the tour playing part, so don`t ask me. If you know more about Google Earth than I do and can improve this fine multimedia experience, please let me know.