Deutschland, Part 3 (Mittenwald and Innsbruck)

Retrieving the van from the garage was much easier than depositing it into the garage, and so our trip out of Munich went smoothly. For about three minutes. Then we got onto a main road where there was some pretty serious construction going on. We sat in traffic for ages, glaciers whizzing by us on all sides. (Well, they could have, anyway.) At some point, the monotony got the best of me, and when I woke up a few hours later, we were just outside Garmisch-Partenkirche, where the scenery looked a lot like this:

A house next to our guesthouse

I had been to Garmisch before and decided it was my favorite part of Germany. Mittenwald, I decided, was even more charming.

We saw a lot of churches in this part of the country with the onion-shaped dome, though we never did figure out how   the trend got there - it was the sort of style I associated with far-away Russia.

Mittenwald's charming downtown area, at the foot of the mountains

Mittenwald is in a valley, with dramatic mountains rising up seemingly out of nowhere on all sides. I am accustomed to foothills, like the kind we have in California, that lead slowly to steep mountains, but that's not the way it works in this part of Germany. The downtown area was pleasant, but rather more dominated by boutiques than I would have liked. We discovered a pair of men's swim trunks designed to look like Lederhosen in amongst the fashionable scarves, bright shoulder bags, and chunky bracelets.

It seemed that every building in Mittenwald had flowerboxes under the windows, elaborate murals adorning its outer walls, or both.

Our first hour in Mittenwald was lovely. After settling into the guesthouse, which was run by a proprietress who was gruff but, we decided, appropriately German-ly so, we walked to the center of the town where the boys promptly bought beers at a local bar. And then it began to pour. We split up and tried to look into various shops for a while, but it wasn't turning out to be a very pleasant experience, so we regrouped in a small, cozy restaurant, had lunch, and retreated to our guesthouse where I wrote postcards and everyone else played a board game.

It was still raining as we sat down to breakfast, and the weather report did not look promising, so we elected to drive over the Austrian border to check out Innsbruck for the day. Things cleared up as we drove, and while it was initially cloudy when we arrived, by the end of our day in Innsbruck it was sunny and beautiful. Innsbruck is a famous skiing city, and I found myself wishing it was winter. We strolled around the old city and had lunch at a cafe.

Downtown Innsbruck

By the time we got  back to Mittenwald, it was sunny and beautiful, and we decided to ride up a gondola to the top of a nearby mountain peak. At the last minute, Dad suggested that we hike down. The guy selling tickets was very against the idea, as it was already 5:00 and the hike down took, he said, 4 hours, which would leave us hiking in the dark. Dad was confident that we could do it faster than that, and eventually the man threw up his hands and sold us the one-way tickets anyway, against his better judgement. The views from the gondola were lovely. (Jane, again, chose to sit this one out.)

The hike down was nice, but it was hard to enjoy much of it because I was a bit worried. If one of us turned an ankle, we'd have been in big trouble. (I felt better when Anthony successfully called Jane from the mountain; at least rescue was an option in case of injury and no one would have to climb down for help, leaving part of the party on the chilly, rocky mountainside.) We hiked down a scree field for the first two hours. It was rough going. We'd slip and slide on the rocks whenever the slope was especially steep. David was the only one who had on shoes with appropriate ankle support, and we had no water and no flashlights. I kept thinking about wilderness accident stories, and many of them, it seemed, started out just like this.

It was also not very pretty. We hiked by a patch of snow and lots of large rocks. Then, at last, we came around the side of the mountain to see the valley below us in the evening light. It was beautiful, and quite a relief.

Our terrain. The bottoms of my feet were aching by the time we got to the bottom because my shoes had thin soles and it seemed I could feel every rock!

We were all pretty relieved to get to the more pleasant path. We had seen some sheep on a hillside about an hour before, and Anthony walked ahead, then hid behind a bush and baa-ed as we came around the curve, causing Mom to get very excited about seeing a mountain goat at such close range. He emerged, to her astonishment, and passed the next few minutes tossing small pebbles at me from behind. The brother-sister relationship doesn't change with age, it seems.

Almost there!

The next morning, before we piled back into the van to drive north to Weimar, I took a short walk by the river that ran along the edge of Mittenwald. The water was a pretty incredible powder blue color from some mineral in the light-colored rocks, and there were some lovely wildflowers. It was all very peaceful, and I was sorry to go, though new adventures in Weimar awaited!