Ali- I was purusing one of my favorite Swiss family outings blogs looking up a hike to Seealpsee (stay tuned for that adventure!) when I came across a post about Elm Riesenwald ‘theme’ trail. I was immediately intrigued by the theme of this 2.6 kilometer loop: a rogue giant has left some mayhem and cozy domestic scenes in his wake. It helped that you got to take a gondola up to a ‘sportbahn’ and then ride ‘mountain carts’ down. Full disclaimer: we had no clue what either a sportbahn or a mountain cart was but both sounded not to be missed. So we set off early for the 2 hour trip to Elm, a beautiful ski and winter paradise area in eastern Switzerland.
After a train, a bus and a gondola we made it up to the sportbahn and found a kid’s paradise of activities, all perched on the edge of a cliff. We tried out the field of trampolines, the giant basket swing, the huge lawn bowling lane and the big buckey ball climbing structure
At last it was time to face the Giant Forest. It was clear from the entrance to this trail that all other hikes would, from now on, be dead to Maya. One month in and we had reached kid hiking nirvana
The very first Giant caused obstacle along our path was a ‘large versus small’ race course. Since Maya and I are now approximately the same size, Joe played the part of the large competitor in all races. Maya captured the finger-biting epic battle between Joe and myself.
Maya was anxious to see what could be more fun than watching her decrepit parents creak their way through a giant-inspired obstacle course and it turned out she reported that to be her favorite sight in the Riesenwald when we finished. Makes me think there might be a market for middle-aged parent olympics. But other cool things were the overturned house that the giant carelessly left along the trail complete with furniture luckily nailed down (now up) and the giant suspension bridge that prevented our clumsy giant from crushing the wee woodland creatures and plant life…. at least that was the best my German language skills could do with the sign translation explaining this suspended net.
Our hiking prowess was now such that we conquered the 2.6 kilometer hike without much whining or granola bar face stuffing and we headed back to the sportbahn trampoline park for a little flipping practice. Once we had made ourselves sufficiently ill we went to the mountain cart shack and rented 3 scooters for the return trip down the mountain. As much fun as we had already had, we really weren’t expecting a day topping experience but it turns out rocketing down a hiking trail in a go cart with uncertain braking power is about as fun as it gets. Note the guy behind the counter didn’t even blink an eye when we put our 10 year old daughter in control of her own mountain cart with the vague instructions to gently squeeze both brake handles to avoid locking up a wheel and spinning off the edge of the cliff. 
Words can’t really describe the joy mingled with disbelief at our being allowed to ride these little cliff launchers down the mountain. This may have even topped the middle aged parent olympics. When we reached the bottom, we were rather devasted that the ride was over and consoled ourselves with hot soup and cold beer as we waiting for the bus back. Hard to imagine we are going to top that ride. Parasailing anyone???