6/12/11

On Sunday, Tiin had joked the night before that we were going to wake up at 6:55 in order to have breakfast right when it opened, I actually woke up at 6:54 and we were in the restaurant for breakfast by 7:15.  I thought that was funny because the joke turned into reality.

The view of the mountains surrounding us that we woke up to was gorgeous and the sun had just come up over the peaks in the East.  It was shining on the little lake that the restaurant overlooked and I took a lot of pictures thinking about how nice of a view that would be for the families that live in the restaurants for the summer season in order to provide for the hikers.  We were on our way shortly after, and Sunday's hike was the harder hike I was told.

I knew why pretty much as soon as we set off.  We headed straight up the mountain that our cabin was next to.  When you go up, the paths just zigzag back and forth at an incline because if you tried to go straight you would literally be climbing the mountain.  It took a little while for us to reach the top part of the mountain closest to us, but once we were there, it was mostly straight across toward the Hoher Kasten peak that we were headed for.  Hoher Kasten means "high closet" in English.  Tiin was trying to come up for a reason why it is called that, but he could not, so I accepted that it just is.

After a couple of hours hiking to it, we stopped at another restaurant that has a cable train leading to it for food supplies or in case some people do not want to actually climb to get to it.  A lot of the really high restaurants have these cable trains.  The temperature changed quite a bit while we were hiking, depending on the wind.  Also, at the time that we stopped at that restaurant, we were pretty much eating inside of a cloud.  We could see the way we had come the day before, but the other side of the mountain was invisible to us.  I thought that was pretty funny and was temporarily blinded at one point because of the sun reflecting off of all the white color of the cloud.

Let me throw a quick side note in saying that pretty much the entire time we were hiking I was thinking about how nervous my dad would have been with his fear of heights.  I was trying to decide if the about 1 1/2 foot wide paths that went close to straight down on either side at some points would have been enough to keep him from the view at the end.  Then I decided that he would probably have just liked to have taken a different route to the top, because there were many options.  There were also so many people of different ages hiking that we passed, babies being carried in the sacks on people's backs to almost elderly people.  It was so refreshing to see that big of a difference in age groups all doing the same thing and everyone saying hello, in some way or another, to everyone else because friendliness is a must when hiking.

We headed out again after our nice break.  I was definitely nervous at a few parts of the hike, paying more attention to what my feet were doing than I ever have before, and it took us another few hours to get to the top of Hoher Kasten, but it was definitely worth it!  I could see Austria, Lichtenstein, Germany, and Switzerland from the top and everything was absolutely gorgeous!  We had something to eat and drink, played some more cards, took a lot of pictures, and then headed back down the mountain toward the car.

It took only two hours to get down, compared to the two days it took for us to take the route up that we chose, but my toes were pretty tired from jamming into the front of my shoes on the trip down.  A few times while going toward the top of Hoher Kasten we had to make our way down to go back up, which I understood because that was the only place there was a path, but still was a little exhausted from.  There was no more going up on this route, which was nice because to me that would not have made sense.  We had another break for a drink at the bottom of the mountain and I just kept staring up at the peak thinking about how we had just been up there.  It was a pretty amazing feeling.

That night, the five of us, plus another one of their friends named Martin, had a bbq at Tiin and Daniela's apartment.  It is a very nice place and I had a great time.  Cony had even made me an American cheesecake to bring because she found the recipe in a magazine or something!  It was very good and I could not believe that was the first time she had ever made it.  I liked getting the chance to know everyone a little better and I am really happy that this is where I ended up getting to continue my softball career.  I had a terrific weekend!