During the last days I spent in Vienna, it’s been damn cold all over Europe. For Vienna, this means around -12° Celsius, loads of sunshine, and wind.
After all the exams and all the studying the weeks before, I finally took the time again to make one of my Wednesday Walks. This weeks’ targeted area was Türkenschanzpark, a rather big park in the 18th district, where most of the CS kickball games take place.
The meeting was set up for 11 am, and a small group of people had registered either through CS or via mail/text message. Still, at 11.09 am, after waiting for 15 minutes in the freezing cold, I decided to start my walk. Some minutes later, I got a text message from Albert, who often takes these walks with me, asking me not to wait for him as he had overslept 🙂
Here are some impressions of the walk. After 40 minutes, my legs were prickling, my nose was nearly falling off, and I was more than happy to see the next bus to take me homewards would arrive within 3 minutes 🙂
We’re in Boston right now and will be on our to Montreal tomorrow. Just wanted to give my non-facebook friends and followers this short heads-up.
I’m being a good girl, too, and keep documenting what we’re doing with both pictures and daily emails I send to my Mom. Yes, I’m Mommy’s little girl, an proud of ot!
Telling my partents about my exaxt itinerary (well, as exact as it was at the time), my mum insisted on my coming home before leaving for the US. So I last-minute arranged a train ticket to Innsbruck, a couch to crash on, and made my mum happy by telling her I was free to go skiing somewhere around Innsbruck on Saturday, 4th of February.
My train arrived at 10 pm, and after a short journey through town, I was at my friend Barbara’s where a all-prepared couch was awaiting me. In the morning, my alarm went off at 7 am to make sure I would be ready when my parents arrived. We had decided to go to Kühtai, a medium sized skiing area 25 km southwest of Innsbruck, located 2020 meters above sea level. When we got out of the car, we nearly froze immediately. A really strong wind was blowing, and according to diverse sources, the temperature was – 25° Celsius. To put on our skiing boots, helmets and so on, we went inside – otherwise it would have been way too cold.
My skiing jacket includes a kind of thermometer, but obviously it is either 10 ° off, or it just couldn’t bear the cold.
Due to the wind, the cable car was shut down, so we had to stay at the one chair lift with a bubble that is available at the area. This also restricted us to 2 variations of the same slope, but it was still okay as we had anyways only planned on skiing for half a day, and there was nearly noone around. The snow was powdery, the sun was shining, the air was clear, … and after 2.5 hrs we decided to stop by the one hut along the one slope to have a hot chocolate and some Gulaschsuppe.
The hut was awesome, they had a tiled stove heating up the whole place to a cosy 20 ° (plus), there was a lot of wood used in the rooms, and decoration was suiting the name: “Zum Kaiser Max”, which shows the connection of emperor Maximilian (I.? II.? I always forget) with the area. This guy loved to go hiking, hunting and fishing, and in Tirol you can do it all. He made Innsbruck his seat of power and also came to my home town once in a while.
my mum and dad, all bundled up against the cold
quote from Emperor Max: “I live, do not know how long and die, do not know when; will go, do not know where; I wonder how I am so happy.”
the horizontal line in the middle of the picture is Kühtai retaining wall
The areas in the “thermometer” only have strong colour when the inscribed temperature is reached.
the more-than-cosy tiled stove, drying and heating up our gear (and smouldering other’s)
After this relaxing and re-warming break, and some more skiing, we got out of our boots (which took some time especially for my mum) and helmets and took another way – through Ötztal valley instead of Innsbruck – back home.
In order not to get you bored while I’m away, I have prepared some more posts about the long weekend I spent at my parents’ place before heading to the US. They will pop up every few days so you get something to read (and look at) and I won’t be stressed out to present up-to-date pictures and texts all the time.
I just hope this trip’s pictures don’t sustain the same fate as the ones from 2008 – I merely posted about a third of the trip, and did not get any pictures uploaded at all …
Happy following, and I’ll try and post the first US pics and recaps on 28th, right after arriving 😉
Time and time again when I come home, I am astonished of how beautiful my home area is. Meet lake Plansee, one of the larger lakes in Tirol. It’s not an accident that I linked to the german Wikipedia article – the english version is literally 3 sentences long, so I’d recommend to use some translating service like babelfish to get the information out of the german article.
Anyways, here are some pictures from a walk I took with my parents on Sunday, February 5th.
camping cars enclosed by snow
a view across the lake
walking onto the ice here means risking your life
small chapel nearly hidden by the snow
the paths around the lake are closed due to avalanche risk
E-Ticket for the flight: check. Confirmation of payment: check. Visa confirmation: check.
Together with my driver’s license translation and my passport, earplugs and an inflatable pillow, this stuff is now hidden in plain sight in my room, so I won’t forget where I put it.
Next step: Check the wardrobe for everything that absolutely has to come along, so I won’t freeze to death (Montreal is having temperatures mostly below 0° Celsius at the moment). I’ll never say “I don’t have anything to wear” ever again. I have lots of stuff to wear, I just always wear the same stuff …
Then I’ll have to get the beer I want to bring to my hosts, and the chocolate Nicky “ordered”.
And I should not forget that just before taking off to New York, I’ll also spend some days in Tirol, so packing for going there should also be thought of.
This usually is one of the busiest north-south connections in Tirol, Fernpassbundesstrasse, leading from Füssen in Germany to Nassereith and on to Innsbruck.
It was closed yesterday morning due to high avalanche risk, and was reopened this morning.
The only other way to get to the south because of this was to drive north to Füssen, then southeast to Garmisch-Partenkirchen and south via Mittenwald and Seefeld to Innsbruck, though parts of this route were restricted to vehicles using snow chains.
In December, there were two cookie baking sessions happening at my place.
This is – approximately – what we used:
2.5 kilograms of flour 0.75 kilograms of sugar (and vanilla sugar) 0.8 kilograms of chocolate 0.5 kilograms of almonds
Doesn’t sound like much? Well, we made enough cookies for a party with 15 people, a dinner of 5 people, getting me, Georg and my room mates through Advent, and we still had enough so Georg and I could take about 0.75 kilograms home to pamper our families 🙂
And here are some pictures:
By the way: last-minute deciding on which cookies you want to make can make baking slightly difficult. For example, as we did not have star shaped coookie cutters, we had to make cinnamon moons and boots instead of cinnamon stars. And Georg, lucky him, managed to get the last 2 packages of crushed almonds at the store, as well as one of the last packages of flour …
I will see that I get more pictures from our friends, because the really good ones are not on my phone. Georg also made a cinnamon man … and there’s a picture of him eating it.
There is a GeoCache not too far from my parents’ place back in Tyrol (cache on GC.com). It is located at Frauensee, a lake some way up a mountain. Hiking there takes about 1 hour in Summer. I hiked up there with my parents at least three times in 2011, but never brought a GPS with me (once, because I was being childish and stupidly sulking).
Finally, when I was back home during Christmas Holidays, I managed to take the GPS with me up to the lake, and even had the coordinates saved onto it.
Still, I did not manage to find the cache. Look at the pictures to see why…
If I had looked at the spoiler picture at the end of the cache description, it would have been clear which tree is the right one. But still, I was standing in snow, half frozen on top and powedery below, up to my hip. I guess I’m just a whiny little good-weather city geocacher, then …
So last Sunday, January 8th, Georg and me went skiing. Kira, a CS friend of ours, had posted on the Vienna Group that she wanted to go, and we immediately decided to join her. At the weekly meeting on Thursday before, one of the tenants of Flying Pig said he’d also come with us.
On Sunday morning though, I received a text from Kira that she wasn’t feeling well and would stay at home. Paul did not show up at the meeting point either, and also did not call, so this left Georg and me alone.
But this gave us the possibilty to last-minute change our plans upon arriving at Semmering train station. First we had planned to go to Zauberberg, which is actually at Semmering itself, but as a free shuttle bus to Stuhleck skiing area was waiting at the train station, and the bus driver and the skiers already aboard the bus were so nice and convincing, we decided to go to Stuhleck.
The weather wasn’t too nice in the beginning: it was snowing und heavily clouded until noon. As snow kept falling, heaps and heaps of it made a mogul pistes out of every slope. It was quiet fun, but very exhausting, especially as there were lot of people on the pistes.
After our lunch break, the clouds parted, and especially the lower parts of the area became more and more sunny. We did our last descent around 3.20 pm, having skied for about 4 hours. Unfortunately, it was way too cold to stop and take pictures from the slopes, so here are two pictures I took while being indoors:
