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 :)

Austria Day 1

Upon arriving in Innsbruck we figured out which bus to catch and headed to Patsch.

Oh how I loved Patsch. It was smaller than you could possibly imagine, but just beautiful and quite. Once we arrived we headed into the one and only hotel and lucked out in being able to check in early. We were also informed that the restaurant would stop serving food at 2pm, so if we were hungry we needed to eat soon. I was a little hungry from a light breakfast so I decided to give it a try.

After dropping off our bags in the room and exploring our room … with an amazing view from our balcony... we headed down to get some grub. We quickly realized that everything on the menu was written in German. HA! Our waitress … who was also the person that checked us in … luckily spoke pretty good English and tried to explain the menu a little. I decided what the hell I’d be adventurous and try the cheese dumpling soup, which turned out to be pretty good … I was proud of myself. When I finished up my soup we decided to check out the village. We walked down the narrow roads and ended up finding a trail and ended up back on a road towards our hotel. That exploring pretty much took up most of our afternoon (not because the village was so big, but because we took our time and took lots of pictures).

When we got back we pulled out the computer and checked for local restaurants in nearby towns (since we saw none while walking through the area and our hotel’s menu wasn’t that extensive and was in German). In that search we found that the only real food was in the next village down … about 2.3 miles back. We figured, well we walked 1.3 miles everyday in Edinburgh to the theater… we can handle that. We ended up at a Pizzeria … I know we were in Austria … but it basically came down to the fact that they had a menu in English. BUT, even though it was a Pizzeria I ended up eating Wiener schnitzel. I didn’t know exactly what it was but it ended being fried pork … anything fried typically ends up being pretty good. We also got a hot apple strudel for dessert … unfortunately it wasn’t so tasty. After that big meal we ended up taking the bus back to the hotel …who wants to walk 2 miles after stuffing themselves?

Balcony View

Eating my afternoon soup at the hotel

View from back of hotel

I had jeans on...

walking back to town

Dinner

apple studel

Short Visit to Munich

So as some of you already know Jeremy and I are back in the States. Even though we are back I will continue to blog so I can share our travels from the last few days!

We arrived in Munich around 7:30am as planned, but had a two hour wait for our next train so it gave us some time to explore. After locking up our bags in the luggage lockers, we headed out on the town. We pretty much just ended up walking a few blocks around the station, but at least we were able to see a little bit of Germany… if you can call those few blocks Germany …and also buy an apple strudel! (wink to Arthur) Jeremy also got a cherry strudel and a bratwurst.

We were able to get some good pictures and see a few interesting structures. Once we felt that we were getting close to boarding time we headed back to the station for our train to Innsbruck.

From Munich to Innsbruck was about a 2 hour train ride. The two hours actually went by quickly and was very scenic. We had to cross through the Alps into Austria and the view was just amazing.

Amsterdam

 I'm going to first start off saying that I'm sorry about the crappyness of my last blog.  It had decided to throw around my sentences and put them where it wanted ... and all I could do was go with it ... I had to hike the Alps for peets sake.  I didn't have time for blog shmog.

Febo...sorry we went..but didn't eat.  We had waffles instead!

Anywhos ... I'm waaayyy behind on our travel updates ... but hello I'm on my honeymoon ... what can you expect?  As of right now we are in Paris...just finishing up our first day but here is all about Amsterdam ... I actually wrote this about 3 days ago ... just wasn't able to post it.

 Amsterdam ... oh Amsterdam … I must say I’m a little disappointed in you. I didn’t actually see much of Holland and I believe that the majority of the country is actually quite beautiful, but I was just not impressed with Amsterdam. I don’t really know how to explain why I feel that way, maybe it just felt a little bit dirty plus there seemed to be construction going on everywhere which didn’t help the picture out.

While in the city we walked around a bit to get a feel for what was going on and then headed to our one hour canal cruise. Other than the fact that it was a bit boring, because they failed to really inform us of anything, I think that it was my favorite part of the day. It was nice to be out on a boat floating through the canals. You get a whole different perspective than seeing it on the street. There are also house boats all along the canals which can be pretty unique.

After the cruise we ventured out on the streets again to see what other sights there were to see. Oh and were there some sights. We ended up in the Red Light District … which was pretty much just one street, or at least it seemed that way. It was only about 5:45pm when we got around to that area so I’m sure it was nothing compared to what it could be, but it was still a little crazy. Also a little awkward to turn a corner and have girls half naked dancing in the window waiting for you. Awkward … oh yeah I already said that. Anyways. Once we finally got away from all that, we quickly ate dinner and headed to board our train for the night.

Jeremy and his Chocolade Melk

The train ride started out to be pretty exciting. We had this tiny little sleeper car room, but who cared it was on a train! I unfortunately eventually realized that we weren’t the only stop. We continued to make stops the whole night. I’m not sure if we really continued to pick up people. I think the last people I heard get on our sleeper car was around 11:50pm, but we definitely did stop. If you haven’t figured this out yet … I’m a very light sleeper. Any disturbance in noise tends to wake me up unless the noise quickly goes away and I’m in deep sleep. The continuing train noise wasn’t so much of a problem as the disappearance of the noise (when the train stopped) and then the start back up of it. I really have no idea how much sleep I ended up getting. All I know is that I started out on the top bunk of our room and ended up on the bottom bunk crammed in with Jeremy when the morning rolled around. Unfortunately that came around 6am and I didn’t really fall back asleep after that.

Stay turned for Munich and Patsch, Austria!

Traveling Across the North Sea

Well as you can imagine we made it to Amsterdam. Right now I am creating this blog on the train to Munich. It’s about 10:26pm and we arrive at 7:30am so I’ll be heading off to bed soon, but not before a Dutch treat! Of course I had to hit up the grocery store and load up on sweets…I couldn’t leave the Netherlands without them.

Unfortunately we have no WIFI on the train and haven’t had it in a few days so you’ll get this post when I’m finally able to get online. Hopefully that will be soon considering we don’t have a phone so no one can contact us except through email.

Ok well I’ll start at the beginning. Our last performance in Edinburgh actually went really well. We had a decent size audience and it felt good to have good applause and finish the show on a high note. On a not so good note, the girl that was supposed to be filming the show forgot something and left so we now have no film. Boooooo. Oh well what can you do? Another show of course! As of right now that’s not in the works. After the show we all headed out to have a company dinner and then had to go back to the theater to remove our set. We finished up everything and got to bed sometime after 3am. Luckily we didn’t have to catch our train until 1pm the next day so it worked out ok.

On Tuesday we took all our belongings, boarded the train, and headed to Newcastle. Once we got to Newcastle we caught a bus from the train station to the dock and jumped aboard our ferry/cruise boat…it’s technically considered a “mini cruise”. Ahhh our mini cruise, well let’s just say…they got us pretty good. I had prepaid for breakfast the next morning but hadn’t planned anything for dinner. The lady at the check-in counter noticed this and decided to talk us into paying for the buffet dinner because it would be cheaper to pay in advance. We decided what the heck it’s our honeymoon and it’s a buffet … how can you go wrong with a buffet? Oh you can go very wrong and we did. The first major complaint was that it cost us ₤19.99 pounds each….this is close to $34.00 per person….yes…per person, but whatever it’s our honeymoon and we’ll pig out. Our second problem was the beverage selection. No beverage came with the buffet. That’s right $34.00 doesn’t get you a drink also. Then when we asked for tap water the waitress flat out said “I will not serve you tap water”, so we then said we don’t need anything to drink. I just couldn’t handle paying another € 4 for a bottle of “still” water. I mean really how ridiculous can you get?

After the waitress then looked at us like she was disgusted with us and continued to do so the rest of the night we then headed to the buffet to be yet again disappointed. The food was room temperature at best or served on ice…boiled crawfish…crab legs…neither of those were seasoned. Oh how we miss American food. We ended up just loading up on the kids buffet and sweets and quenched our thirst with watermelon. Oh those ignorant Americans. The Princess of Norway cruise staff/cooks should take lessons from the Vegas Buffets….now that’s how you eat.

After dinner we hung out around the ship. We went out on the front of the boat, looking at stars, freezing our butts off, and overall just having a good time. Jeremy’s even pretty sure he saw the space station. Once we were sufficiently frozen we headed back inside and caught a cruise ship “entertainment” show….yeah.

Bed time came after that. Sleeping on a cruise ship was a little difficult for me. Jeremy of course was knocked out. I found myself needing to look out the window a lot, even though I couldn’t see anything.

Morning quickly came and brought along with it yet another venture to the buffet. This one turned out slightly better than the one before, but not by much. It only worked out better for me because they had pastries…and they were delicious. Plus they also had a fountain for orange juice, apple juice, grapefruit juice, and get this…water. What really rattles our nerves is that this “machine” is built into the counter top, but they just had it covered up for the dinner buffet.

Well I think I’ll end this blog with that. We’ll continue with our journey through Amsterdam next.