One of my favorite places to be in Europe is atop the Zugspitze—the highest point in Germany. Standing on this 9,700-foot peak, you can’t help but marvel at the thought that you’re the highest person in the entire country—number one out of 82 million. From here, facing south, I feel like a maestro conducting a symphony of snowcapped peaks as the mighty Alps stretch seemingly forever to the right and left.
The Zugspitze also marks the border between Germany and Austria. Before Europe united, you had to show your passport just to walk across this mountaintop.
Lifts from both countries meet at the top. As if waging an epic battle of alpine engineering, just a few years after the Austrians built a cable car to their Zugspitze station, the Germans drilled through the mountain in 1931 so that a cogwheel train could deposit nature lovers on a glacier just below their side of the summit….