Today we know that our hosts are late risers so we decide to explore the area on foot until they wake up and eat breakfast. They live in a relatively trendy neighborhood at the foot of the Zugerberg and you can actually walk to the trails so that is what we try this morning. Finding the right trail is a bit difficult but we make good progress and reach the foot of the funicular from where the right trail suggests itself.
We walk on the paved road towards the car parking place and from here it is dirt roads mostly. There are a few paths that enter the forest but due to the rain they are muddy so we decide to keep to the less dirty “drt”roads.
It is true that the area here is crisscrossed by trails so you can spend days exploring. Today it is a very brief exploration but even so we find a nice waterfall right next to the road.
There are also unexpected sights along the way, like a sport installation with a nice spring nearby and many signs with trail names but no distances. So if you don’t know where you are going you are out of luck, still at least you know where you are going which is better than many trails in the US.
We start on a descending dirt road listening to the birds, and there are a few, and looking for mammals, from which there are none.
Our turnaround point is a vista of the lake which is when we understand how much we have descended…and have to climb back. We return to our friends home, eat breakfast and then leave with them to explore a slightly different area of the Zugerberg.
What we want to explore with our friends is the funicular. We plan to go the top walk around a bit and then descend before leaving their home completely. There aren’t a lot of people waiting for the funicular so in we go and soon we are on our way to the top.
Halfway we meet the other descending funicular and here is where we understand that both of them are like counterweights on a really long steel line, likely this reduces the cost needed to move them up and down the hill.
The view from the top is quite beautiful and we have a chuckle when right to the restaurant in the upper station is a sign saying that the restaurant is 10s away, funny.
Just outside the station is one of the famous Swiss boarding schools. It costs about 80K USD at this point in time per year to board a child here, not cheap in any way.
We then explore a bit at the top and then it is time to go down and leave our friends house and drive towards the airport with two more stops planned on the way in Zug and Zurich.
