Täglich Wiederkehrendes Abenteuer

And that’s day 3. Wait… I say that at the end. OK, starting over.

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Time for the day 3 update! This was our “big day”. By that I mean, skiing day. That’s right, we finally went skiing. We started off the day with our huge breakfast, as normal, then went down to a little shop and rented some skis, ski boots, and some ski poles. In short, we got ski gear. With the ski gear firmly in hand, we returned to the hotel to suit up. Mary Jo tried to warn me that wearing ski boots sucked, but I ignored her, thinking “If they are so bad, then why to people seem to love skiing? Wouldn’t some super horrible footgear diminish the interest in the sport?” Well, I should have listened.

We got our snow pants on and strapped on the boots. Then we walked down to the bunny hill. Walking in ski boots truly sucks. I had no idea it was so incredibly awkward and painful. We made it down to the hill though and started in. Now, when we say “bunny hill”, we’re not talking a Minnesota bunny hill. No, we’re talking something twice the size you’d see in Minnesota. Mary Jo was even a little scared of the thing. I had no hope. Given these facts, we opted to stay close to the bottom and try to get me going with the skiing thing. It didn’t go wonderfully. I couldn’t really slow down, stop, or turn, all things you kind of need to ski. Mary Jo kept in on me though, and I managed to get to the point where I could almost nearly slow down most of the time.

Mary Jo did decide to make a few runs on the bunny hill.

After a bit, the little lift closed down for lunch, so we decided to head back to the hotel to change for the next adventure. We walked up the bunny hill and got a picture of a pisten bully, just in case that other one decides to disappear from the internet.

We got back to the room and started tending to our wounds. Those ski boots chafe something fierce. Mary Jo actually had blisters on her shin. Youch. At least the view from the balcony made it a little better.

You can barely see it there on the bottom of the picture, but during the summer that’s supposed to be a pretty nice garden. There’s a little fountain and I’d imagine benches.

After a little rest, we headed back into town for the second adventure. We decided to take the big lift up to death mountain to see what the deal was all about. We hopped in one of the cable cars and started up. The first part was pretty tame.

And by “first part”, I mean the first 10 feet before you start zipping up this cable 70 feet above the ground. That part was less tame. I managed to make it most of the way up with my eyes open. I did, however, refuse to look behind us. This is the only image I have of the view from the cable car:

Now, you remember this image from a few days ago?

I had kind of assumed that the structure up there was the end of the lift. Yeah, I got that wrong.

We hit that structure, then discovered that the dang thing goes up about the same distance we had just covered. Toward the top the view got precipitous, so a little eye shutting and deep breathing and Valium was necessary for me. Mary Jo was simply having a blast enjoying the view.

With that said, the terror of getting up there is totally worth it. Once you hit the peak, you get a whole new view of the mountains. (As usual, click for larger)

As an aside, that is the 1000th picture/video we’ve taken in Austria.

This is what the top of the peak looks like.

There’s a full restaurant up there. It also breaks off into 3 or 4 different ski paths. It’s crazy because you can ski down into the other side of the mountain (where there’s nothing), and then catch a chair lift back to the top. It’s kind of crazy. We stopped in to the restaurant and had some hot chocolate and a donut.

Continuing with the amazing view…

One little thing that we saw up there was a snow mobile with a big flashing light come through with two people plus driver on it. It looked like a snowboarder had taken a tumble.

Yeah, you can see ALL that from this peak. It’s pretty insane. And we’re not even done yet!

See that squiggly mess at the bottom there? Yeah, that’s the entire town of Saalbach. Zoomed in:

After we did all our viewing, we had to take the cable car back down. I was less than excited about that. We managed to get down. I just didn’t look at anything. It went OK. Once back on nice, low, safe ground, we went back to the hotel and got the ski gear for a second go. This one went a little better than the first. Joni did the bunny hill a few more times and I managed to get to the point where I can almost consider turning. We did that for another hour or so. It’s a little weird, because pretty much everything related to skiing shuts down at 4PM. The lifted shut down, the hills are closed, and people retreat back to restaurants or bars. For as serious as these people are about skiing, you’d think they’d be doing it until dark.

We returned our ski gear, went back to the hotel, and hit the sauna again. It was quite relaxing. We then had a little chunk of time to rest before dinner.

Dinner this evening was the usual affair. We had the salad bar (including an entire bowl of feta cheese chunks – Joni about died from excitement), then some yummy cheese crouton soup. The main course was lamb with green beans and scalloped potatoes. It was quite good. We had never had lamb before. We both liked it. Dessert was different in that it was buffet style. We tried some mousse, apple strudel, some kind of cake, and various fruits. It was scrumptious. Once again we were too full from the main meal for the cheese cart, so we retired to the room. We’re doing our Internetting for the day now and are quite pooped from the full day, but since we’re going home tomorrow, we don’t really need to get to bed early to prepare for some big adventure. We’ll see what the evening brings.

Not to spoil the surprise, but we’ll probably fall asleep watching TV. That’s just how we roll.