My Weekend Workout Routine

On the way up the Rax Alps for the weekend...

Throwing snowballs in June

We reached the highest point - 1783 meters!

Liam! My 7 year old tour guide for the weekend - he suggested that this was the best spot to take a picture :)

Simply hiking down just seemed too boring...

Hello down there!

This weekend was a nice change of pace from the busyness of the city. We woke up really early so that we could take the bus about 1.5 hours outside Vienna to go hiking up the Rax Alps and stay the night in a lodge. The first part of the hike was the worst - it was about 1/2 hour of straight, steep uphill through muddy dirt, and I was getting annoyed that that was how it was going to be for 5 hours. Fortunately, though, after about an hour of that (the group I ended up hiking with, we took our time) we reached the first stop, and after that the hike was a nice combo of forest and rocky cliffs and meadows and beautiful scenery. Like I said, we took our time and took a lot of pictures along the way. Our second stop (about an hour and a half later) was a restaurant where I got this soup made up of thin pancakes sliced into strips in a beef broth - it sounds disgusting at first, but it's actually really good! Our group got more and more adventurous as the day went on, so we took the cliff route instead of the meadow path, and it was beautiful. Liam, the 7 year old son of one of the speakers for the Senior Seminar class this weekend, caught up with us and was leading the pack, since he's already done this trip "a hundred times." I started talking to him, and from that point on he was telling me stories and asking me questions and just wouldn't stop talking the rest of the hike - he was fun to hang out with :) Our group got to the lodge around 5, we cleaned up and had dinner at 7, then it was time for the euchre tournament! haha - it was fun, even if I did get out in the first round. I ended up watching the Holland-Russia game that Holland ended up losing in double overtime :( We went to bed, then woke up early this morning so that we could beat the hikers coming through to the lodge's breakfast, where they served some of the best hot chocolate I have ever tasted! We started heading back down around 11, and were booking it through the mountain. It had been beautiful all weekend, a little on the warm side (I definitely have burnt shoulders right now), but when we sat down for lunch, we noticed a dark cloud in the distance. We started to hear thunder rumble, but decided to pack up and keep going to the next stop. It was interesting trying to carefully climb down slippery rocks when you see lightning flashing out of the corner of your eye. My group felt a few drops of rain while we were walking through a wooded area, but then reached the stop. No later than when we sat down underneath the roof outside, it started POURING. Slowly more groups were coming in, completely soaked. The rain lasted for about a 1/2 hour, then we went down the ridiculously steep part for the last leg of our trip. Everyone boarded the bus, we turned the AC on to counteract the smell of 50+ sweaty and wet hikers, and headed back to Vienna. Overall, it was a great weekend!

Some random things I've experienced:

• 5 euro EuroCup backpacks from Billa work perfectly for weekend hiking trips!
• When you wear an orange Hope t-shirt on the night Holland is playing, all of the waiters who don't speak English get really excited and try to show you that they are rooting for Holland too.
• Knowing that if Russia and Turkey turn out to be in the EuroCup finals, most Europeans will be really ticked, a lot of them don't think they should even be allowed in the tournament.
• Walking the escalators at the U stops secretly trains you for the hiking weekend.
• When there is only one shower per floor at the lodge, you come up with other creative ways to clean up.
• Deer in the Alps are not white tailed, but black tailed.
• Snow fights are a lot of fun on 90 degree days, especially against 7 year olds.
• When they don't serve you dessert somewhere when you've become accustomed to it, you react by buying out their entire collection of magnum ice cream bars.
• The strangest goal of my life - I can't even explain it on here, you'll either have to ask me in person so I can act it out or youtube it.

I'm off to bed because I'm exhausted from this weekend but I have to take in as much as possible during my last few days here!

Liebe,
Andi