We’re back from our three week European trip and I have several posts to put up. I barely pulled out my computer the entire time; we were with extended family and the weather was largely cooperative so there was lots to do. In the evenings we sat on the balcony and drank wine and chatted. Sometimes it was nice to just sit on the train and look out the window. It’s a good life.
The first week was spent in Austria with our family from Atlanta. Our kids had two cousins to play with and the four children had a great time playing together from morning to night: going to the bakery in the morning to choose their breakfast, every day an outing, and lots of ice cream and desserts.
The thing my kids were most excited to share with their cousins was Baerenland, a large rustic playground on top of a mountain. To reach it is a 400 meter ascent in a cable car. Favorite activities included a zipline and a pair of rafts that the kids can pull across the pond. The kids are always in sight even if they’re at the other side of the playground so the older ones can basically be turned loose.
We let the kids run around for a few hours and then lingered over ice-cream. We actually stayed a little too long as a storm blew through which caused some disruption to the cable car service. When it finally resumed, we piled in to one of the cabins only for the wind to pick up. I was starting to make fun of my sister for being scared, but at about the halfway-point the wind grew stronger and they stopped the cable car, leading to a tense five minutes stopped and noticeably swaying above a mountain side. Everyone was brave; the operator mentioned when I got off at the bottom that there was a “free adventure included with your ticket!”.
The Waelderbaehnle is the remaining stretch of an old narrow gauge railway that served the Bregenzerwald in the early twentieth century that has now been converted into a museum railway. We pitched it as an activity for the kids, but I probably enjoyed it the most. It’s usually hauled by a steam locomotive so one gets the smells of coal smoke and machine oil and the sounds of steam. I’m a mechanical engineer; a steam locomotive is pretty much my ideal of a perfect machine. They run the locomotive around at the halfway point so everyone can get out and watch them uncouple and re-couple the locomotive. Syd had questions about the workings of the engine so I used the stop to point out how everything fit together and what each part did.
Our final Austrian activity with the cousins was to go to a small zoo of Austrian animals like red deer, ibexes, and marmots. It’s on top of a small mountain accessible via cable car from Bregenz (but it was a calm day, no high-wire excitement this time) and after the zoo we walked back down the mountain with the kids. There was some grousing about the hike but the kids did well with only a few slips and a single rock-throwing incident.
Next up, Belgium.
1 Response
Lesson learned – don’t make fun of your sister for being not calm about terrifying moments! But it was a great trip!