The Rest of our Austrian Vacation

The rest of our vacation was a blast.  We snowboarded Thursday and rented skis on Friday.  Saturday was a day of driving, and unfortunately we ran into even MORE traffic on the way home... It was a fantastic week but its nice to be back...

A break in the sun

Me snowboarding!

Our final night in the Alps.

Rodelbahn

Thursday night we decided to go sledding.  Not just any sledding, sledding down a 5km sledding run.  When would we ever have a chance to do that again?? Probably never... though it almost happened that we never got to go in the first place...

I really wanted to go sledding.  I looked in the tourist info book to figure out how to do it.  All I could find was the name of the place and the phone number.  Not helpful.  I went to the tourist information center.  There, I found out where on a map the sledding place was (not helpful), and that I should call if I wanted more info.  I tried to ask more specific questions.
How do we get there?
Call a taxi.  Or drive.  It says right here in the info book.
Can we rent sleds?
Yes.
What do we do with them when we're done?
Why don't you call?
Do you know how much it costs?
No.
So we can go sledding (pointing) here anytime?
You should call.

Grrr... very un-helpful.  Strike one for info center woman.

According to the map, the sledding hut is about 3 miles from the closest bus stop.  We'll definitely have to take a cab.  The info lady circled the statement "taxis and traffic can travel to and from the hut from 13:00-14:00, 15:30-17:00 and 19:00-22:00.  Fine.  We'll find a taxi between those times. But what about the sled?  She says they rent them at the hut, but how do we get them back up there???

Never mind the sled rental (I decide at 5:45pm, 15 minutes before all the stores close), we'll go to the sports store and rent one.

The guy at the store, who, for the record, does not work at the tourist info center, says "don't rent a sled here, you can just leave them at the bottom of the hill!"

Really?  The woman at the info center couldn't have said that???  Strike two for her.

So 8pm comes along and we're bundled up to go sledding.  We get into the taxi (because it's between 19:00&22:00) and start on our way to the sledding hut.

The road is just wide enough for one car and we're in a van.  The driver is driving 50mph around hairpin curves on a road covered with snow.  Next to the van on one side the mountain climbs at a ridiculous angle, and on the other side, drops away- no guard rail, fence, snowbank....  The driver starts talking on a cell phone while accelerating.  I keep telling myself he does this every day, but we're all holding on for dear life.

Finally, after a 15 minute ride from you know where, we are deposited at the top of a hill next to a dark house.  Hopefully someone's there, we think...

We find the sled rental door which says "sledding from 10:30pm on."

REALLY?? The woman from the info center couldn't have said THAT??  Strike THREE!!!

Turns out the sledding run is also the road that runs to and from the hut.  So you can't sled during the hours traffic is allowed to drive on the road.  Ridiculous!!

Fortunately, the hut also had a restaurant with awesome apple strudel!

At 10:30 we rent our sleds and procede to barrel down the sledding run, around the hairpin turns, next to the scary drop offs, and past the tiny lights the illuminate the path (every once and a while).  It was terrifyingly awesome!  Once I figured out how to steer a sled that is...

Unfortunately, I have no sledding pictures.  Partly because it was very dark, but mostly because I had to hold onto my sled for dear life.

Despite our adventures getting TO the sledding, I think it was my favorite part of our Austrian vacation!

A Sweet Ice Cave

Once, when we lived in Austin, we went to the Inner Space Cavern.  It was awesome.  I mean, we were adults, and all the other people on the tour were little kids with their parents and the tour guide had all sorts of silly stories about the rock formations (like the "ice cream cone"), which were obviously meant for kids, but it was still cool to see all the stalactites and stalagmites and underground rivers and things.

Bob and I have also been known for making snow forts.  Usually, when there is enough snow and we visit my parents for Christmas, we pile up all the snow from the deck in the back yard and carve it out into an awesome snow fort.

So, when we saw the sign for the Ice Cave, it was like two really awesome things put together- caves and snow forts- and we knew we had to make time to see it.

We had to ride all the way up to the top of the Glacier to see it.  After paying for our tickets, we waited around for the tour with about 30 other people at the "Ice Palace Container".

We all followed our tour guide to a sheet in the wall on the backside of a ski slope... (wasn't looking too promising at that point).

Once inside, it started out like a giant snow fort.  We had plenty of time to examine the snow crystals on the wall as the forty people in front of us snaked into the depths of the cave.  After 15 minutes or so, when we were starting to wonder if we'd ever get past the entrance, we realized what was causing the hold up.

We had to trek down a set of ice stairs.  This might not have been a problem if it weren't for the following two issues.  1: it was warm at the glacier- above zero- so the snow and ice was melting and refreezing.  Even with the rubber treads, those stairs were slippery.  2: We were wearing snowboard boots- not the best range of motion, but pretty decent boot-like rubber soles with nice thick treads.  Other people were wearing SKI BOOTS.  Slick, plastic-bottomed, non-bending ski boots.  I'm surprised no one fell and hurt themselves!!

So far, the ice cave was way cooler than our snow forts.  We never had stairs.

As we snaked through, the line kept moving even slower...

Because we had to climb down metal ladders.  REALLY?? Metal ladders?  With ice and SKI BOOTS!??!  You could never have something like this in the US.  It was like a law suit waiting to happen.  But all the ski boot clad tourists clambered down, slipping once in a while, but always catching themselves.

It was actually very beautiful.  Aside from the fact that we crammed 40 or 50 people into an ice cave meant for a tour of 10, it was just like an ice cave with stalactites and stalagmites and everything.

We learned (at least I think- the tour guide spoke German) that the ice on the Glacier shifts up to 40 meters a year and that the inside of the ice cave is always changing- much quicker than the inside of a rock cave.  My favorite part of the tour was the room where they lit the ice formations in different colors.

It was really awesome to see an entire cave made of ice.  I wish we had the time and money to take the real expedition where you get to crawl through things and have to be clipped into a harness, but the one hour tour was pretty cool (literally).

My standards for snow-fort making have definitely increased.  Good thing we'll be moving to a place where they get a lot of snow in the winter...

Snowboarding!

The weather in Austria is fantastic!!  Warm and sunny, but still enough snow to snowboard on!

We spent Sunday, Monday and most of Tuesday snowboarding.  I was so excited to get out on the slopes that I got up super early on Sunday.  Here is the very early dawn out our window.

We snowboarded at a mountain close to our apartment (we could walk there) on Sunday.  

From the lift

Bob on the lift.

I haven't been snowboarding very long.  After just the first day I was covered in bruises.  Here is one of the times I wasn't falling.

The first mountain was nice, but the most beautiful views were from the Glacier- the highest mountain in the ski valley.  It was so high up that to get to the top, there were THREE gondolas.  Crazy.

We had a blast snowboarding.  There isn't much else to say about how awesome I am at it, so here are some pictures to show how incredible it was.

Looking down into the valley where we stayed.

After a long day of snowboarding, it was always nice to stop at one of the mountain huts at the top or bottom of a lift, or this little place at the bottom of the Glacier, for a drink or a snack.

And it was even nicer to get home to a warm shower!

Arriving in Austria

The trip to Austria was supposed to take 6 1/2 hours.  The drive through Germany isn't very exciting and its the longest part of the trip.  There are a lot of fields and windmills.  Windmills used to be fascinating, and every time I saw some I'd point out the window and yell like a little kid, "look at the windmills!!".  But now I've seen enough that windmills are windmills and they get old after a while.  Same with cows and horses.

When we take long car drives we like to get Burger King for lunch.  Its one of the increasing number of fast food chains in Germany, but we only get it on road trips.  Its okay... but Bob loves it.  So around lunch time we decided to find a Burger King.  The GPS said there was one only 2km off the highway....

25 minutes later we were in a strange town full of one-way streets.  Somehow we managed to drive off the streets all together and found ourselves in the middle of a pedestrian plaza surrounded by pedestrians (who wouldn't get out of the way for the car that wasn't supposed to be there) and streets marked with "do not enter" signs.  The GPS was going crazy. "Turn left on... Turn right... contin... left... turn... make a u-turn??"  To make matters worse we somehow managed to attract a cop car... AND we never found the Burger King.

We did see a really pretty church though.

And we finally found our way back to the highway... only to see a sign for a rest stop with a Burger King just a few minutes later... 

The nice part about driving to Austria was that the boring part through Germany (and the exciting detour) took just as long as it said it would.  It was only once we got to Munich (which is pretty close to the border) that we encountered the ridiculous amount of traffic as all the other cars from Germany (and Poland and Hungary and the Czech Republic and even the Netherlands) piled onto the same highway to get to the ski resorts.

Fortunately, Munich is close enough to the Alps that we started seeing snow-capped peaks.  

Even though the last hour and a half of the drive took us three and a half hours, it was beautiful and we were excited so we didn't mind much.

I'm pretty sure there weren't even real traffic jams.  There were just a bunch of signs that  said traffic jam (stau in German) and every time the cars passed under one, everyone slowed to a crawl until they forgot the sign and sped up again... 

Notice we are before the sign.  No traffic.  Notice the traffic backed up immediately AFTER the sign.

We also got to drive through some sweet tunnels.

This is us IN the tunnel... 

And finally, we knew we were almost there when we passed under this ridiculous gondola.

Notice there are no posts.  The crazy thing starts ground level and goes on just cables up half the mountain.
We did NOT ride in that one.

**NOTE:  Due to the lack of internet in our apartment, these posts are dated according to when they happened... even though I'm posting them all right now, from Dresden.  Sorry!

Austria Trip, Austria Trip, Austria Trip...

For those of you out there who love to travel, I don't know what's wrong with you!  Maybe I need lessons or something, but it never fails... a few days before any impending vacation, I flip out.

The days prior to any vacation look like this:

"What is our hotel going to be like? Do we need our own towels? Is there a coffee machine?"
"How does the bus work?  How late does it run? What if I can't figure out how to get places?"
"What is there to do there?  How much does it cost? How long does it take??"
"What is there to eat? What food should I bring? What clothes do I pack?"

And an hour later I'm sitting in front of the computer with 10 browser windows open, each with at least 5 tabs, trying to find every site on the internet with information about the place I'm going.

I sit and make a list of all the things we need to do, how much they cost, where they are, how to get there, why it's cool.

Then I take that list and try to make a schedule- not just a general schedule- down to the minute.

And still, as I'm traveling to my destination, I have my pen out and I'm scribbling things in the margins and crossing things out.

When I get there, I go to the tourist office, find all their information, make another list, make another schedule, cross-reference it with the first schedule, and finally... I'm ready for the vacation.

EXCEPT... I forgot thing 1 and thing 2, which I immediately must find a store to purchase in case they are needed.  AND, its colder/warmer than I thought, so all those clothes I packed, well, they aren't going to do any good because I will wear the same thing every day so that by the time I return home I will stink.  ALSO, I didn't realize that half the things on my list actually don't fit into the schedule because it takes longer to get to the places than I thought or their opening times have changed but they didn't put it on the website.

SO...

I might as well have not done any of the prep-work because we pretty much wing it once we're there... finding things to do as we walk past them or because some other tourist mentions them to us.  I shouldn't have packed a suitcase because I only wear what I had on when I arrived and bought any other necessities, AND, I've already ruined my schedule with so many scribbles and foldings and unfoldings and somehow dropping  it in a puddle that even if I wanted to use it, it's useless.

Why, then, do I continue to torture myself?  Maybe it's the thought that eventually, all that work is going to pay off... Maybe it's because in the back of my mind, my subconscious doesn't like to travel and is trying to put me off of planning any more trips... Maybe I'm just crazy...


Saturday we leave for Austria.

At this moment, I have already made my first list and my first schedule, and revised them twice.  I have a map with so many stars and circles and highlighted things that I don't even know what's what.  There is a pile the size of Mt. Everest in my guest room of stuff we need to bring.  I will go shopping today to buy everything else that is on my 3 page list of stuff we need to bring and don't have yet.

Tomorrow I will pack everything, think that I forgot some items that are checked off on my 10 page list (but maybe I checked them off by accident), unpack everything, repack everything, decide on a few more things to bring (which will require me to unpack and repack again so that everything fits into my allotted number of bags), and make a list of all the things I need to remember to do before we leave (like take out the trash and turn off the lights).

Saturday I will wake up and inevitably feel the need to unpack and repack one more time, just to make sure we have everything.  We will leave and follow my "things to do before we leave check off list" but I will feel like I left the stove on and have to come back in to check.  Then we will start driving, but I will forget something really important like my sunglasses and we will have to turn around and come back to get them.  Then we'll leave again, but I'll feel like I didn't lock the door and I'll have to go back and check.

I will probably spend the whole vacation staring out of my apartment window at the Alps.  Maybe I will venture onto the ski slopes.  But after all that planning, I just need a relaxing vacation!!

T is for Tiger and also Tux, Austria

Regrettfully, this may be my last Animal Alphabet page for a while.  We are planning a ski trip for next week to the Austrian Alps!!  There's a lot of preparation involved since we have to tune up the snowboards, pack all our gear and clothes, plan our meals for the week, buy lots of food and snacks and drinks, and research where it is, exactly, that we are going...

SO, here is "T is for Tiger".

In case you are interested in where we are going next week (which you very well may not be, in which case I totally grant you permission to stop reading here) this is where it is:

We have this really cute apartment here- a very helpful site as it is all in German, but at least there's a nice picture.

We're skiing (snowboarding actually, but "snowboard vacation" doesn't sound nearly as cool as "ski vacation" or even in German, "ski urlaub") at Tux.  There are also lots of other cool things to do there like a 5km sledding run, ice skating, cave exploration and even a fireworks show.

It should be pretty awesome...