Wanderings in Germany/Austria: Part I

Our wanderings in Germany and Austria were exceptionally cool. As mentioned in the previous post, Sam and I had bought tickets to Germany as a sort of graduation gift to ourselves with the dual purpose of visiting my brother in Mainz, Germany, and spending several days trekking from hut to hut in the Austrian Alps. Not a lot of planning ended up happening due to the sudden notice of our move to Morocco, but everything still went very smoothly.

We landed in Frankfurt at 11:00 a.m. on a Tuesday, headed west to Mainz to my brother’s apartment (he was in Sweden at the time), dumped a bit of Moroccan-bound gear in a corner there, showered, then made our best efforts to get all the way to Innsbruck, Austria (6 hour train ride) by that evening. This was not terribly realistic since we had no idea where we would stay that night and would end up in Innsbruck around 1:00 a.m. with train connections and such. From past European small town experience, we guessed that local inns would not be thrilled to answer their doors at 1:00 a.m., so we modified our plans. We hopped off the train in Munich at 9:30 or so, hunted down a room near the train station and spent the rest of the evening in the Augustiner Keller beer garden. Beautiful.

The next day we made the rest of the journey to Innsbruck and called some Austrian friends of my friend Aaron (from OSU) who he had met in London some years earlier and suggested we meet. Leila and Harry and their two year old Vincent were awesome people to spend some time with and were incredibly hospitable!! My suggestion that Sam and I were going to grab a hotel in downtown Innsbruck for the first night was met with a hearty “Why the hell would you do that?” … Harry picked us up at the train station, we left our backpacks at their place and went back down to Innsbruck to wander for a while. We got back to their place around 11:30 or so and drank sage tea and talked until very late, then spent the entire next day hanging out with them in Natters, a small village outside of Innsbruck.

So, Leila and Harry: Leila worked with Aaron in an outdoors store in London for a year or so, then went to film school there. She’s now a full time mom and also does film work with her squeeze, Harry. Harry was a professional snowboarder and is now making his own extreme sports films. (Sam and I watched a film produced by North Face in which Harry and this other guy did a first descent of this giant mountain with a huge ice cliff in the middle that they had to rappel down. Nuts!). While we were visiting, Harry found out that he got a job coaching the Canadian snowboarding team in British Columbia. So, there is a fantastic chance that we’ll get to see these two again when we’re back in Portland. Thanks SO MUCH for the hospitality Leila and Harry!

On Friday, Sam and I headed to Neustift about twenty minutes south of Natters in the Stubai Valley and began four days of walking in the Austrian Alps ... covered in the next posting.