Switzerland Day 5 - Bidding Adieu with a trip to Heidi land!

On our last day in Switzerland, we decided to wrap up with a visit to Mount Stanserhorn. After the customary early morning rise, cooking and packing, we vacated our place of stay and put away the luggage in the lockers at the Lucerne railway station (a fully automated, convenient and safe option). We then picked up some goodies at one of the cafes and boarded a bus to reach the base of Mount Stanserhorn, where a very quaint wooden cogwheel train greeted us :) As always, the ascent was lush green and we were constantly accompanied by the typical clang of the Swiss cattle bells.

The magical view as we chugged up the mountain

After alighting from the cogwheel train, we walked up the remaining distance on the very neatly laid trek path. The scenery was truly a grand finale to our Swiss trip - stunning green and snowy mountains all around and absolute silence with just the cattle bells reverberating across the valley every now and then. I remember standing still for a while, just to take in the scene around me and soak in that silence. Those moments of total silence while surrounded by nature still remain etched in my memory. 

The imposing mountains and lush greenery that surrounded us as we trekked up

After that scenic trek up to the summit where we spent some time enjoying the panoramic views, we began our descent and a surprise awaited me. A little wooden cabin stood enroute with a board that said 'Heidi's house'! I did a quick google search and found out that the fictional town and setting that featured in the book 'Heidi' was actually conceptualised based on this very mountain! Oh how thrilled I was! I had read Heidi just the previous summer and completely fallen in love with everything about the book, especially the fairytale mountaintop village where Heidi lived with her grandfather. I looked around the mountains with renewed awe and went into a reverie for a while until a cranky kid and a harried husband with eyes on the clock shook me out of it. We had a train to catch and a flight to board soon after that!

Heidi's house!

A dream like cogwheel ride, bus ride and train ride later, we bid adieu to the most beautiful place in the world and flew over to the next leg of our trip - Italy. We landed in Venice, looking forward to explore the magical and historic islands from a bygone era :)