This is part of the Europe trip posts.. The previous post on this series of the trip to Mt. Titlis is here..
Our adventure on top of Mt. Titlis deserves a post by itself.
We had reached the top, and started walking to the "glacier walk". That meant going up the Ice Flyer.
The kids wanted to go on their own and we said "NO". That actually turned out to be a good decision.
A lot of people were turning back because there was no visibility. The traveling Narayanans were not going to turn back. Not when their leader was wearing shorts and a T-shirt to Mt. Titlis.
So we went, sat on a ski lift type thingy with a pull down plastic cover that comes almost to the waist and the operator gave a tap on the plastic shield and off we went..
We settled in and took this picture.. we were all smiles..
It was a fast steep climb and after just a few seconds on the thing, hail started hitting our feet and the shield. The noise level was unbelievable. When we reached the top, we could not even put our foot down because everything had frozen and the operator at the top told us "you are not getting down here. the ride is closing and you have to keep going down". So we sat on it as it turned around and started coming back down. A flash of lightning and boom, the transformer was out.
We were just hanging in there for a good 15 minutes with hail and snow coming down. I slowly stopped feeling things below my knees.. then after a few minutes below my waist. My reproductive system I could not care less about, but my ankles and knees and hips.. how will I do yoga? lots of thoughts going through my mind.. when the family started thinking out aloud..
one girl started praying to Vembadi Vinayagar (the local Chennai temple favorite) and another girl started talking about her last days on the planet.. we made a video while being stuck on the lift.. and then the backup power came on and very slowly we got down to the stop. There were folks stuck in the operator room (almost 40 of them) and all of them cheered when we came down. Then two more lifts came and we cheered. Apparently four lifts were stuck out there for some time and they were working very hard to get everyone down.
The view below from the stuck lift.. blue glacial ice!
The organizers of the place told us they did not expect the storm to move in so fast and that usually they will close the ride the minute they see a storm like that move in. We told them we were good and got an adventure and will remember this for a long time. The lady smiled and said "unfortunately none of you can walk back to the building because there are still lightning strikes. please wait till we get an all clear"
We joined the crowd in a small room at the base of the lift and waited for almost 30 minutes before we were all escorted at a slow pace to the main five story building.
We were badly in need of some warming up. A hot cocoa had never looked so appealing in my entire life. After a few minutes and a realization that we were about to miss the ride down, we ran.
We were the talk of the bus as everyone had heard about the four lifts that got stuck. At least we made it up and came down.. most folks just ended up spending the entire time in the five story building with restaurants and shops watching the hail pound on the glass.
This hilarious video pretty much caught the whole thing in bits and pieces.. wish I could have subtitles for it..
All said and done, Vembadi did his job.. we were back and had an interesting family adventure!
This definitely helped change plans for the next day. We were to visit Grindelwald and possibly go to the "Top of Europe" or "JungFrau" but given the weather, we decided it was pointless to do the same thing again the next day and pay 500+ $ / person to go up that mountain on a train...
turned out to be a wise decision. We actually ended up having a great time in Grindelwald.. that will be tomorrows post..
