Day 7: Pemmern

Today was our final day in Bolzano and it began with quite a bit of travelling. First of all, we took the Renon cable car up to Soprabolzano, then from there we took the little train to Klobenstein as we had done on Monday. But today we weren't planning to walk to the earth pyramids. Instead, we caught a bus from outside the station in Klobenstein to a small place called Pemmern. Pemmern was only about a quarter of an hour away from Klobenstein on the bus and it's the starting point for a gondola cable car, which goes up to a point called Schwarzsee Spitze at just over 2000 metres. Tim and I discovered we didn't even need to pay, as the cable car was included in the Bolzano card we'd received from our apartment. Unfortunately, the rest of my family weren't so lucky!

It was fun going up the mountain in the gondolas; they only seated about 8 so we managed to get one to ourselves

Once we got to the top we got our first glimpses of the panoramic views we'd been promised.

We were following a panoramic loop trail, which was supposed to have really great views.

We did indeed get some great views of the mountains, although sometimes it felt like there was a lot of shrubbery between us and them.

It turned out that this area has all kinds of different pine trees.

These were mountain pine, which don't typically grow to be more than 3 metres high.

The pine trees weren't the only nature we had to admire. We also passed some kind of mountain sheep with very long ears.

It really was a very scenic path

It hasn't come out very clearly in the photos, but we could even see one mountain that had the remnants of snow or a glacier on top.

You might be able to make it out towards the right hand side of the photo below.

The other great thing about the panorama trail was that it was circular.

As we began to loop round we had some different views...

...and also got to see some different types of pine trees.

We hadn't realised as we'd been walking that the path was leading us downhill, but after we'd got about halfway round we realised we had quite a lot of uphill to do to get back to our starting point.

The final part of the trail took us past the Schwarzsee lake which the cable car station is named after.

It's a slightly unusual lake, not least because it's behind a big fence. No idea why!

Once we'd completed the route, we headed to the restaurant at the cable car station for some lunch. We all finished with a slice of this absolutely enormous Apfelstrudel!

Then it was time for the journey back to Bolzano via gondola, bus, train and cable car! Tomorrow will just be a day of travelling, as Tim and I have a 06.55 train to catch for the first leg of our journey back to the UK. It's been a lovely trip away though to a beautiful part of the world and it's been fun to celebrate Dad's birthday with the whole family