Austria
June 17 - July 14, 2009
Sunday, June 21 - Innsbruck
Last night Annemarie had offered us a ride to Innsbruck, on condition that Rubby would drive the car since Annemarie was nervous about driving on the Autobahn and in the city. So the kids went with Oma to play at the 'basin', to pick wild strawberries and to play along some of the Alpinolino stations. Yup, on father's day Rubby abandoned both kids to go geocaching in Innsbruck! ;-)
So Annemarie, Martin and us drove down to Gossnegg farm to pick up Annemarie's mom and we headed to Innsbruck where they would be visiting Martin's friend Florian at the hospital and we had a couple of hours to walk around. Our main goal was an earthcache which featured a type of rock called "Hoettinger Brekzie". It turned out the cache was up the mountain a ways, behind the alpine zoo. The cache was actually a rock wall and apparently the practice site for a climbing club. While we took our obligatory photo and answered the questions for the cache, we had fun watching the climbers.
On the way back we picked up another couple of caches. Unfortunately we didn't get the "Golden Roof" cache. Although we finally zeroed in on the site, it was behind a fake bush right between the tables of an outdoor restaurant patio and after about 5 minutes of skulking about, the waiter asked us if we were looking for something and we decided to call off the hunt rather than to try and explain.
3.5 hours and 10km later we met back at the hospital to head home just as the rain was starting up again. Luckily we had our gps maps for Europe loaded and while Annemarie and her mom tried to remember which way to go, we just followed the gps routing to get back to the highway. This time Rubby drove right back to the farm, successfully navigating the narrow and curvy mountain "roads" with the standard transmission car.
Back at Uri's we arrived just in time to greet Oma and the kids coming back from their adventures. We played a little with the kids while Uri and Oma made us a yummy meal of Schnitzel with handpicked and home made cranberry sauce, and potato salad.
Flowers in Uri's garden
Christopher is checking out the garden.
Sammy found something even better than flowers... snack time!
The church in Westendorf - The patron saint of Westendorf is St. Nikolaus.
After driving around the block several times we finally found parking near the Innsbruck hospital.
Typical narrow streets of European cities.
It seems fitting that an angel be found on St. Nikolaus street.
And once again we find St. Nick!
View over Innsbruck. In the distance is the Olympic ski jump.
The cliff feature in the Hoettinger Brekzie is popular with local climbing enthusiasts (and graffiti artists!)
We stayed a while to watch the climbers.
The climbers helped provide scale as we had to estimate the height of the Brekzie rock layers for another one of the cache requirements.
In between the Brekzie layers were this layers of Loess which were softer sandy type stone.
Rubby figures he can easily make it to the top.
Buffalo in Innsbruck?! Oh ya, we're right by the Alpenzoo.
A huge "Schnecke".
One of the many police vans we saw today, each with 4 to 6 cops in them.
Some beautiful buildings in Innsbruck.
when Rubby is on vacation he doesn't check his blackberry... but he will eat this one!
A go-train bridge.
At the top of the hill was the cliff for the earth cache.
On the way back to the hospital we stopped for a couple of "Tradis" (traditional caches) like this one.
You know you're not home when you find a cigarette as a cache trade item!
Is this where we parked the car?
There was a whole parade of 'classic' cars going through downtown past the Golden Roof.
the view from the Golden Roof landmark down the central tourist street of Innsbruck.
Rubby was trying to search for a cache but never did find it.
The Golden Roof (Das Goldene Dachl)
our tracks for the day (10.5km)
the elevation profile of our tracks.