Ida had to say goodbye to her vacation friend Frida with a heavy heart! It didn't go without tears on both sides, which also broke our hearts as adults! After a short chat with Ralf and Katja and exchanging phone numbers in case we are in each other's hometowns, we were alone again as a family! 100% family time. It was actually quite nice to see Ida happy as she played horse farm and Bibi & Tina with another child. We were fortunately disconnected from this scenario!Now we had to take on the second and third parts of the imaginary horse riding competition again! Yay!As nice as it is at the campground, we are starting to feel cramped. More and more Germans are arriving, and with our tent, we are more of an exception: bigger is always better and the caravan parade never ends. Since most of these new campers probably have warmth and water in mind, we decided to go for the opposite: cold and snow. So we took the cable car up to Mount Kanin, which reaches a height of 2200 meters!Or rather, we went to the mountain station of Kanin. The summit is another 387 meters higher, although calling it a mountain is not quite accurate, as it is actually a massive rock formation! Anyway, before we went up, we stumbled upon a website that explained in great detail the entire cable car system, including its construction and changes in the cables! This gentleman is to cable cars what Sheldon Cooper is to trains!There was actually something interesting for us as well. The cable car has been operating for over 50 years, with two intermediate stations because the load on the cables would otherwise be too high. The entire journey (allegedly) covers a surprisingly long distance of 5.9 km and takes 25 minutes, making it (probably) one of the longest, and at least one of the most spectacular cable cars in the entire Alps!If he says so...In any case, it was fascinating and somewhat alarming! At times, it felt like we were going straight up, then there was a short section where it felt like going back down, and all of this in a 4-person mini cable car that would immediately start rocking with the slightest movement. It was shaky and bumpy at times! When we reached the top, we had sweat on our foreheads not only from the tension but also because the cable car cabin was fully glazed. Conveniently, there was still enough snow up here for us to cool off again! During the ascent, we were initially confused when a lady with a sled came towards us in one of the cable car cabins, and we thought it might be a mirage due to the heat. But no, there had actually been fresh snow the weekend before. So here we were, at an elevation of 2200 meters, in our shorts and summer tops, surrounded by summer snow! That was a new experience for us as well. And of course, we had to celebrate it with a snowball fight and multiple slips and falls.The view was also simply fantastic: on both sides, there were mostly bare and rugged rock walls, and thanks to mostly clear visibility, we could see all the way to Italy on one side, and deep into the Slovenian hinterland on the other side!In addition, there was the wonderful silence, only interrupted by Ida's laughter whenever one of us slipped and fell!With a cold beverage from the après-ski bar (also checked off), we took a stroll and enjoyed the solitude, peace, and view before taking one of the last cable cars back down around 4 pm!Grateful for these memories, but suddenly quite tired, we couldn't avoid a family round of horse farm at the tent! We couldn't change it, we had to do it! And just to see Ida's smile as we built and played the obstacle course made it worth the "fun"!And with a good book, the latest GEO Era magazine, and a glass of whisky from Nuremberg (thanks to Benny), this day ended up much better than it had started early in the morning!
