After yesterday’s demanding walk, we thought we’d rest the “uphill walking muscles” and do something different today: rent bikes, take the Penkenbahn gondola up to the top of the mountain right next to Mayrhofen, and then bike down back to the village.

Renting bikes took a fair bit of time, because it wasn’t easy to find a bike with back-pedal brakes for Adrian. But we found them in the end.

The gondola ride to the top was fast and smooth and we had nice views of Mayrhofen. The gondola was very spacious and we had no trouble at all fitting the bikes in there.

At the top, the bicycle path first went uphill for a while, to the ever-present huts at the top. The slope was quite gentle but on gravel roads it was too much for the kids, so we ended up walking the bikes up.


After lunch at one of the huts we were finally ready to start cycling down. Unfortunately Adrian took a bad fall already at the first descent, bloodying half his face and breaking off half of his new front tooth. So that was the end of that. After cleaning and bandaging his face, we walked the bikes back up and came down by gondola again.

All in all, not a great day.