First before we even got to meet Thomas' Family and drop off our luggage or freshen up from our flight Thomas brought us to see 2 old castles. Both were partial ruins. The First was mostly intact but the second had very limited portions of the original castle still standing. Both are being used as restaurants and entertaining space.
The first castle was on the way from the airport to lastschach where Thomas' Family lives. The do raptor shows some days and have some resident vultures. It was actually kind of sad to see these birds with nearly 7 foot wing spans stuck in a cage. A few times we would see one go near the top of the cage and spread it's wings in teh breeze. You could see it imagining it was soaring on the breeze instead of being stuck in a cage.
They were really neat to see though.We arrived at the second castle and there was a wedding going on. Apparently this castle after being turned to ruins was renovated and a big stage was added. The week after we were there Bobby McFerrin was performing and The Three tenors had preformed there.
This view was looking out in the direction Thomas lives and you can just make out Faaker See in the distance behind the stone work. Faaker See is the local lake. It has an amazing blue color that you can just barely make out in pictures. Google Earth does a pretty good job!We got back to Thomas's hous later than his father had planned the meal and had a traditional version of Austrian Perogies, home made. We also met Thomas' family and had good wine.
The next morning I was greeted with this view from the back porch of Thomas' Family's house. From what I was told and can be seen on Google Earth the peak of this moutain as well as the peak of all the southern mountains are the border between Austria and Italy and Slovania. It would take a long time for that view to get old!
Thomas' family besides the language barrier had a hard time figuring out what we would eat for meals. We didn't want to impose more than we already had but some of the meals we were offered were interesting to say the least. We had what they would have called a farmers breakfast this morning. We had a hardboiled egg, meat spreads, cheese, tomatos, Cucumbers, and bread. It all tasted good but it was a little odd to spread meat on bread. The rest of the mornings we did not eat this way. When Emily got up she asked why we weren't offered cereal.
Emily took us on a 16 mile bike ride around latschach that morning while Thomas was at work. This Bike ride was about all Marika could handle because there were lots of hills. The final leg of the journey ended up being cut short because Emily's choice of short cut back to the house was direclty over a rather large hill, more like a mountain. Thomas was called to rescue us and brought a hotel van to get the bikes and return us home.
We came back cleaned up and met some of the neighbors all of whom are related in some way to Thomas and then went to the Kafe Katastropha located right nextdoor to the house. Apparently owned by Thomas' Mothers sister. I really liked the name.
The picture shows their menu but you can't quite make out the name. This is a view from the back of the cafe. The house where we were staying was right over the hill in the picture.Thomas met us at the cafe and we headed off for our first Hike. We hiked over 1,000m up in about 1.4 miles. If I can figure it out I will include the Gpx file from my GPS and it can be opened in Google Earth.
The rest of the day was spent hiking and then we went into Villach after. Since this blog is getting long I will keep this short. Enjoy the pics and if you want to look at way more pics I have included them in a link on the side.
This is Marika making it to the hut were a couple live 6 months out of the year serving food and drink to the hikers on the mountain. It was at over 1,500m above see level.
This is the front of the hut. All 4 of us are there. Emily could have continued but stayed with Marika at the hut as Thomas and I went to th summit.
This is not the summit we went too. I would have loved to. I can't beleive that Emily did this one with Thomas they have also slept at the peak. This peak is called Mittagskogel and was more than 1,000m meters above us.
View from the peak that Thomas and I got to. There was a storm coming in from Italy which is right over this mountain peak. The sun was also setting quickly.
Thomas is right at home on the mountians he is looking out over Austria .
On our hike back down Thomas spotted this frog hoping across the trail. I like taking pictures of wildlife, probably not as much as V does.After our hike we headed into town and didn't really see much. We did have a pint of the local beer Villacher.
That is enough for now. More next time about our trip into Vienna.
1 comment:
Your trip sounds awesome! I like that I got a mention in your post :)
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