Austria Day 2

Day #2 … oh day #2… started out pretty good, but this is how it ended up going down:

This was the plan. We were going to hike the Zirbenweg trail. This required walking back the 2.3 miles to Igls and taking a gondola up the mountain. Once there we would walk 7km (4.3 miles) to another lift that would take us down the mountain to the village Tulfes where a bus would be waiting to take us back to Igls. Sounds easy right?

Well when we arrived at the gondola to buy our tickets we asked the woman selling our tickets what time the last bus left Tulfes and was given a sheet with the times and was told 5:30pm. It was 12pm and the hike was only supposed to take 2.5 hours so we figured we had plenty of time.

The ride up was beautiful and once we arrived at the top it was still beautiful. The mountain was even covered in snow! We later found out that it had snowed the day before so it was fresh. Even though there was snow everywhere … and we were 2,035 meters (6,670 feet) above sea level … and I was in shorts … it actually wasn’t very cold. We ended up hiking along about an hour when we reached a hut and had some lunch. We would later find out it was a lunch that lasted a little too long.

While we were taking a break a nice Swedish couple insisted that we take their map of the area … this would end up being very crucial later. We hiked a couple hours more, thoroughly tired and ready to head back, when we finally reached the lift down. Wooo hooo we made it … 4:35pm and plenty of time to catch the bus. Unfortunately, 4:35pm is five minutes past the 4:30pm deadline to catch the last lift down, the nice gondola lady failed to mention this.

The chairlift lady was actually on the lift and waved and said “We’re closed!”. I then proceeded to have a melt down, because you see in our questions to the gondola lady, one of them was how long it would take to hike the trail down the mountain instead of the lift. Answer: 3 hours. Tulfes is at 923 meters above sea level. That’s a decent of over 3,000 feet! Let’s see. Currently 4:35pm, plus 3 hours, equals 7:35pm..last bus back: 5:30pm. At 7:35pm we would only be in Tulfes, still 13km (8 miles) from our hotel in Patsch.

Well all we could do was go down. We hiked…and hiked some more…and when our legs felt like goo…we continued to hike. Fortunately there were some trails that connected the small villages so we were able to stick to those for most of the way. We got to a village called Sistrans around 9pm and decided to get some dinner. We asked the locals and were lucky to find an open restaurant. We left there around 9:30pm and continued our walk along the road. Most of the rest of the walk was in complete darkness.

Quite creepy to walk in pitch black in the middle of nowhere…even between cornfields…you tend to remember clips from movies (and not the happy parts). We finally reached our hotel at 11pm with aching feet, legs, and blisters on our feet. We left our hotel that morning at 11am and had walked the 2.3 miles to Igls and then continued to walk until 11pm that night. We had officially walked more than we could imagine and were done with hiking. After a bath we hit the sack and slept a much needed night of sleep.

Running down the ski slopes to save some time

Well we took almost 400 pictures so we hope you enjoyed the ones we posted and sorry we had to post so many, but hey...at least it's not all of them :)