Today after a rather boring Kufsteintrip I wanted to head up the mountains again. How do you get your kids up the hill… yes… by promising them the best playground ever on the top (Kaiserwelt). A bit like motivation at work 🙂
From Scheffau the cable car goes up the mountain and you directly hit the playground. It took some convincing that a small hike would be a good idea before then going to the playground. Yeah it worked and we had a small tour called the “Murmeltier-rundgang”. No
Mamots in sight but a lot of hiking stick equipped elderly hikers – by the way the next pest in the mountains after the “E-Mountainbikes”. It is really bad, because some years ago at least the people on the mountain bikes were trained people who knew what they were doing. Now everybody seems to manage to get up the mountains and they do not know what they are doing. Often also very unfriendly as they seem to think they own the trails. And in the valleys they block traffic.
Well and the hiking stick fraction is basically the future because of the demographic change.
But to be fair, there were also families with kids around. Some of the kids walked like ours, and some kids preferred the hard and cantankerous way.
After an easy 3 km walk we came back to the playground, which was a real highlight for the kids. Mostly because of the cool cable cars that both the younger and the older one liked.
It was hard to convince them to go back home to the hotel…
We went to a small gallery 
Buying a house in Germany and especially in the greater areas of big cities is a rather tiresome task. We searched nearly 2 years until we found a house that was almost the one we wanted.
We felt like going into the mountains a bit. As we thought it was too much for the kids and we were not well equipped enough we decided to go for a cable car ride to the top of Monte Baldo. With only 40 minute car ride it was not too far away from Costermano and we were early enough to get into the first car park.
for our older daughter (5 years). So all in all not a cheap trip, but…well we’re on holidays… We got the tickets quite fast, but then the rather small queue to the cable car turned out to be a slow one. After several turns of “I spy with my little eye” and already annoyed kids we finally got onto the cable car. Even though I do not know why there needs to be middle station, there is one. There are some houses but no one really leaves the way uphill. The second part of the cable car ride was really nice as we could look over a huge part of the Lago di Garda. The small one of our two girls did not like it as she thought it was much too high. The car turns 360 degrees on it’s way up the hill, so even she did not have to bear the deep view all the way of the ride.
On the mountaintop you have nice view into the Dolomite Alps and over the Lake. We only walked a short round to the chairlift, which comes up from the other side of the mountain.
backpack for carrying children, we headed back down the mountain with the cable car.
Venice is about two hours away from Costermano, so it is a nice opportunity to go there at least for a day. Obviously it can be just a first impression, but never the less we tried a trip with the kids. It is a dream for a lot of people to once have visited Venice in their lifetime. A dream city it is, if you can block out the tourists who are everywhere. If you want to save some money you should park your car in the Via dei petroli. The parking costs 4.50 € per day which is a good price. You pay 26 € for a day at the Piazza le roma. Form the main road you take a bus for 1.50 € the bus to the piazza le roma. From there you can start exploring Venice.
The Rialto Bridge is a bottleneck in the tourist flow through the city. It was so crouded that nearly nothing was moving anymore. An annoyed Venitian shouted “keep walking, keep walking” and the sluggish mass of tourists started to move and nagged about being advised to move.
We had a very good ice cream and you have at least tree ice cream spots around you when you walk the first few hundred meters. A lot of tourists try to make a challenge out of getting the biggest ice cream. Two guys we saw had ice cream cones that were over 30 cm high. I’d think that was more than half a litre ice cream. One of the two was at least seventy and I had the strong feeling that he just fulfilled his childhood dream of the biggest ice cream ever.
Take my advice and try to be there until ten o’clock. Then you should be save in getting a reasonable parking spot and also the temperatures are still o.k.! Then use the afternoon for swimming.