Last Sunday was one of those frigid, yet super clear days that only seem to come around a few times each winter. We were showing Padma’s brother’s family around and were staying with our friends Karl-Heinz and Hiltrud Linke in their little village of Illerbachen. As the sun rose on a very frosty morning, Karl-Heinz pointed to Germany’s highest peak, Zugspitze, from his kitchen window. With visibility like that we just had to head for the summit.

Upon arriving at the base of the mountain in Garmisch-Partenkirchen (the site of the 1936 Winter Olympics) we realised that half of Germany must have had the same plans we did on this crystal clear Sunday. We got stuck in a long queue to the new cable car from Eibsee as the car parks were full, so we bailed out.

We changed plans and drove to the western slopes to try to access the summit via Austria. As we approached the Tyrolean Zugspitze Cable Car, we figured it must have been closed … we were two kilometres from parking and there was no queue. We drove immediately to a parking spot within 10 metres of the cable car and got to the summit within 20 minutes.

Zugspitze is Germany’s highest peak at 2962 metres and is accessible by several cable cars. From the top we walked back and forth between Germany and Austria and theoretically we could have seen peaks in Italy with visibility like we had on Sunday.