sethbc’s (infrequent) blog…

Yesterday, the day was spent in Garmisch-Partenkirchen (G-P). I know its a mouthful, but it was absolutely gorgeous. And now for a little background on the location. Garmisch and Partenkirchen united to host the 1936 Winter Olympics, and the towns have been a combined ever since. The city is nestled in the Alps in Southern Bavaria, and the geography is simply stunning. Moreover, Garmisch is right below the tallest mountain in Germany, the Zugspite. The chief activities in the region center around drinking beer, shopping, and climbing to the top of this nearly 10,000 ft. tall peak.

Well, as it turns out, we’re lazy American tourists, and not mountaineering experts, so we decided to take the Cogwheel/Cable Car up. The trip was absolutely fantastic, though we were a little dismayed to learn that it would in fact be cold at the top of the mountain (it was, the mountain came complete with a glacier and snow). From the top of the mountain, you have an excellent view of both Austria and Germany. The weather was pretty good up at the top. I think we lucked out — there were only very brief patches of fog (i.e. clouds), and the visibility was generally excellent.

From the lodge at the top of the mountain, they let you climb to the actual summit. Let me be the first to say that the climb was a humbling experience. From the bottom of the lodge, you step down a small ladder to a narrow ridge. One slip on this ridge means at least a 40 foot fall on either side. Crossing the ridge brings you to a ladder mounted directly on the rock. The ladder leads to plateau before the summit. This is where it gets tricky. To reach the summit from the plateau, you have to shuffly along a narrow precipice 3,000 ft. above the ground below, with the aid of only a single steel cable. The precipice flattens into another narrow ridge, and then you reach the crucifix mounted at the actual summit. I decided to hit the summit, and then did the climb again. I’ve got some pictures of me at the summit that I’ll try and post later.

After retreating to the relative safety of the observation deck, I purchased a beer and a wiener as my well-earned reward. From there, we took a different cable-car down to the lake. If you’ve never seen a glaciated alpine lake filled almost entirely from water melted from the snow at the top of a mountain, you’d probably be surprised. The water is by far the clearest I’ve ever seen, surpassing even the bluest waters in the Caribbean.  I decided it would be fun to go for a paddle-boat ride on the lake, and we were pleasantly surprised at how nice it was. There is only one motorized craft on the lake, and it is run by the same people that rent the paddle boats. The water was extremely calm, and in places where the water was shallow you could see nearly 30 feet to the bottom with no difficulty at all. That being said, the lake was extremely deep. Like the finger-lakes, this lake was carved out of the ground by a glacier, at its deepest point, the water is supposed to be nearly 1,000 ft. deep.

One thing that we noticed while out on our paddle-boat cruise (other than the constant burn in our legs), was that a number of people were swimming in the lake in secluded areas. Having brought our bathing suits to go to the beach s it is, we threw caution to the wind and found a little place of our own to swim in. If you’re thinking that a consequence of going in a lake so deep and at such a high elevation is that the water would be frigid, you would be absolutely correct, but man were we refreshed. The water was freezing, but the sun made the temperature bearable, and we swam for at least an hour.

Following our dip in the lake, we relaxed and basked in what was left of the afternoon sun at a biergarten overlooking the lake. As the afternoon faded into evening, we took the cogwheel back to G-P. In town we decided to dine in traditional Bavarian fashion, and I got, of all things, wiener schnitzel. I’m not sure many people (including myself) in the U.S. rightly know what that is; for those of us (including myself) so culinarily-imparied, wiener schnitzel amounts to thin slices of veal, breaded and fried.

It was at this point that the day got to be exasperating. We have reservations in Cannes on the 17th, so we absolutely have to get there by then. We worked out a way to spend a day in Venice before taking the night train to Nice. Turns out though, that the train to Venice was full. Uh Oh. The other problem was that the train was the last one to leave Munich that night, and we needed to get somewhere where we could get to Nice (which takes us to Cannes). We hopped on a train to Vienna (a little out of the way, but we wanted to sleep some), and then on a train back to Innsbruck. If all goes as planned, we’ll catch the train from Innsbruck to Venice, have a wonderful couple of hours in the Venice train station, and then sleep on our way from Venice to Nice. If things do not go according to plan, I have no idea what the hell we’re going to do, but I’m sure we’ll figure something out. Thats enough for now, I’m feeling absolutely exhausted and I’m going to try to nap for a couple of hours.

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