Castles and the Hazards of Traveling with Running Buddies

Neuschwanstein castle is a fairy tale castle (in fact the one upon which Disney bases its logo) near Füssen, Germany. It's a relatively short train ride outside of Munich, so Kira and I stopped there on our way to Munich yesterday. We'd had an early start and a bit of a ride to get there on a regional train (fewer bathrooms and more people) so we were really excited that the station had free bathrooms when we arrived in Füssen. Unfortunately in our excitement, we didn't realize that the bus came only once an hour and missed it.

 

Castle!

 

No problem! We wandered the streets of Füssen, took in the narrow cobbled streets and tiny shops, and even found the town castle! We liked the castle with its painted walls, so we explored and took pictures. We found an open door that led to a spiral staircase and climbed it to find ourselves at the top of the keep, so we took in the gorgeous view and got lots of pictures. Then we heard church bells. The bus was coming in 5 minutes! We moved fast but got lost, and missed it again.

Since we were meeting Martin in Munich, we couldn't wait for the next bus, but we really wanted to see the castle! We'd read that there was a long hike even from the bus stop to the castle, but the station's bike rental signs claimed it was only 5k away. That's not so bad! Only problem was it had started to rain and at 3.1 miles each way it would take too long to walk there. But the train station had lockers, and 5k isn't far...

I was wearing a skirt, camisole, cardigan and toms shoes. But I had shorts under the skirt for easier train sleeping. Kira had running shoes on, and north face pants that looked promising. But her button-down shirt wasn't ideal. Even still, we stripped down to our closest approximation of running clothes--me in my tank, shorts and toms, Kira in running shoes, semi-athletic pants, and a linen button-down--and stuffed our skirt, scarves, layers and purses into a train station locker. As ready as we could be, we took off into the rain.

We had a lovely, if wet, run. We only took one real wrong turn and it cost us only a mile (or two). We made it to the bus stop in about five miles and looked expectantly for any sign of the castle, or even of the valley in which it supposedly sat. Nothing! It looked as though the bike rental shop had lied and we were really still an hour's hike from the castle. With our train time getting closer (especially with the additional mileage) we were worried about even making it to the station on time. Also it was still raining.

When things weren't looking so good for either the castle or our trip to Munich, a bus pulled up! It wasn't going to magically take us to the castle, but it was headed to the station and our train ticked got us on. We climbed aboard (soaking and dressed like a very conservative religious runner and her hippie toms-wearing friend who underdresses for the weather) and headed to the station.

On the bus, Kira checked the picture she had taken of the train schedule and we saw it was going to be really tight with the traffic we were in. We divided up tasks on the bus and hit the station one minute before the train. We unlocked our locker, grabbed everything, and ran for the train.

We made the train, but we were still soaking and dressed like weirdos. I traded out my shorts and tank for my skirt and very buttoned-up cardigan, and Kira changed out her soaked shirt for her cardigan while we waited for her quick-dry pants to work their magic (which they did, way to go north face!). Thankfully, we had scarves with us so deck changing was more of a towels-at-the-beach experience than anything else. And if anybody asked, we'd claim californians do it all the time! Don't you know that?

In the end we did make it to Munich on time and get in a lovely run, but we still haven't seen the castle. It works for me, though, since now I have bait to get Kira back in Europe sometime!

Salzburg and Kira's Adventure

Kira and I spent three full days in Salzburg exploring the baroque old town, taking a bicycle tour of the Sound of Music scenes and sights, and exploring the old salt mines that gave the city its name and wealth.

Sound of music bike tour. Way more fun than it had any right to be!

 

Kira was about as excited as one can be for the tour. Please note the thematic hair.

With our tour guide, Jonah.

Salzburgers love to point out that the city was first settled 6,000 years ago, "1000 years before they built the pyramids." Nearly every civilization that existed on the continent of Europe did something here, with the most prominent being, of course, the Romans and the Catholic Church. The city was ruled by archbishops for most of its recent past, which means that there are tons and tons of very pretty churches in and amongst the other super old architecture.

 

That wall is made of salt mined in the area!

Church and castle/fortress.

Also, this guy Mozart was born and lived there. Austrians are really proud of Mozart, they have statues and plazas and streets named after him, and they've even invented a specific candy for him. A "Mozart ball"is a chocolate ball filled with layers of marzipan and pistachio. They're very tasty, but I can't seem to find out why that particular candy is related to that composer. They're literally everywhere, from tourist shops and grocery stores to the sketchy tobacco shop at the train station.

 

The yellow building is the house Mozart was born in. 

The bottom floor is now a grocery store, but out of deference to the importance of the location they sell tons of Mozart balls and have changed their normally red and green logo to gold at this location.

While we were in Salzburg we got to go running every day from our hostel near town (a habit that utterly baffled out roommate, New Zealand. NZ couldn't understand why we would run before walking all day or--worse--walk all day then go running), and in the process of running we got to explore the parts of the city we didn't see on the tourist maps.

 

A part that's definitely on the tourist maps. I hate carrying my phone when I run so no pictures!

 

Kira especially got to see some bonus Salzburg. She ran to a cheap restaurant to grab takeout dinner (they're really into Döner Kebabs here, which is a kind of sandwich thing of Turkish origin, very tasty) then attempted to run home. As background to this story, please note that Kira's (wonderful and very sharp) mother once famously drive south on interstate 5 instead of north, ending up past Anderson's Split Pea after assuming that there was a second. For those of you not familiar with central California, it's a hundred-mile-plus detour.

Since Kira and I had been running before, she recognized a number of things on her attempted run home. Here was a pump house by the river painted with waves (it must be a citywide thing, not street art as we thought), here a bridge we had commented upon earlier (they have two!) and finally, what a surprise, there is another hostel with the same name as ours! But Kira was looking for OUR hostel, and she was certain she was running towards the city center from far away. Why was everyone running the opposite direction and why couldn't she see the hilltop castle (visible behind her)?

In case you're worried, here's Kira. She's fine.

 

In the end, I woke up to a sleeping Kira (I'd fallen asleep early with a migraine, unfortunately) and an email from her explaining that she had gotten lost and a hotel chef was driving her back into town so she could come home. Kira (the ultrarunner who just competed a 50-mile race) had run so far out of town searching for our real hostel (which she had already seen) that she had to be driven back. We ran part of her route that evening and when she realized what had happened Kira's distress grew with each "doubled" landmark we passed. But she made it home safe in the end, so it's now a fantastic story and a mistake I doubt she'd make again. Moral of the story for those who can, though: if you ran 15 minutes on the way out, don't run a marathon home!

Vienna in a Day

Kira and I got on a night train in Feldkirch, Austria (close to Liechtenstein) on Sunday night, and by Monday morning we were in Vienna! We spent the day in Vienna then hopped on another train to Salzburg, where we are now.

 

In Vienna!

 

The night train was pretty cool, we figured it out and actually got a fair amount of sleep. I think now that we know the seats fold down we'll get more sleep next time, but the conductor clued us in around midnight so we still did pretty well. The economy class cars are divided into compartments of six seats each, and we were lucky enough to share ours with only one other girl so we could fold down all the seats and sleep across two each. It was actually fairly comfortable until we had to fold them up as commuters got on near Vienna.

Once off the train we stopped quickly in a McDonald's for the free wifi (no purchase required, yay!) and while Kira assured her family that she is indeed alive I did some quick googling and mapping and we had a plan! With our snapshots of google maps and a willingness to get lost if need be, we headed off into the city.

Between our arrival at 7:15am and our departure at 4:20 we saw the Nashmarkt (a long-standing food etc market a lot like the Pike Place market in Seattle), the state opera house (populated with guys in Mozart costumes trying to sell us tickets), the main shopping streets and plazas, St. Stephens cathedral, the Hofburg Imperial Palace, the site of the Spanish Riding School (closed on Mondays, but really expensive anyway), the Hofburg's summer palace on the river, the Danube river itself (really cool steer art there, we didn't miss the real art museums), and a very beautiful Park that included some really nice rose gardens and a replica of the Parthenon. It also rained on us intermittently, so we got to duck into some fun cafés for tea, gelato, or lunch depending on the timing.

 

Hofburg Imperial Palace

 

Cathedral. 

 

Kira at our outdoor Danube-side art gallery.

 

A particular highlight for us athletic nerds was accidentally running into the Austrian Olympic team during their pre-travel photo op behind the palace. Most people don't go back there so we were very surprised to something so cool!

Olympians!

I'll fix the pictures when I get to a real computer (edit: did it!). For now, off to Salzburg!

Love Katie

Hiking in Liechtenstein

Yesterday Kira, Martin, and I went up to Malbun to go hiking in the Alps! Malbun is a town in Liechtenstein that is in the mountains, and is the site of Liechtenstein's only ski resort. During the summer, it is a point of entry to tons of beautiful hiking and mountain climbing. There are a number of ranches up there, so the lower parts of the climb are to the soundtrack of cowbells. There are so many it sounds like a waterfall or wind chime, so it's really lovely.

Kira and a cow. 

A nice easy part of the way up.

We climbed from Malbun all the ways up the the summit, at about 2700 meters (times about three for feet). It was two solid hours of up, and we went from grassy mountainsides through scrubby pines and avalanche barriers, up to a mountain ridge with steep-to-sheer slopes on either side, and finally through sawtooth rocks that we scrabbled up to the summit.

Hiking (this is actually on the way down. There were NO downhills on the way up).

Kira on a mini-summit!

At the summit!

On the way down we went another way that had us starting on a ridge trail, traversing some mini-snowbanks, then walking along another ridge that was the literal border between Austria and Liechtenstein. We stopped again at a hut, then walked down through three valleys before we got to the one that is Malbun. We followed a ski lift down and we had made it!

The hut.

Kira on the border! The right side of this photo is in Austria, the left in Liechenstein.

Scenic valley with snow.

Another gorgeous view! You can really see the fog here.

Nearly down now.

The whole thing was breathtakingly scenic. It was incredibly green in the valleys and absolutely stark on the peaks. There were wildflowers everywhere, and the valleys were stunning. Even the high fog didn't take away from it, and it ended up helping since Kira isn't the biggest fan of heights and it reduced visibility to about 30 feet when we were really up there. 

Flowers!

Dr. Seuss flowers

Kira amongst the flowers. Ski lift in the background.

Looking a bit treacherous.

Malbun! We made it.

I was totally exhausted when we finished, but I can't wait to go again!

Love Katie

Exploring Zurich with Kira

Kira (a wonderful friend of mine from Cal) is visiting right now and we have had the best time exploring Zurich together! On Wednesday we explored the city on foot and hung out by the lake with a bunch of very hungry swans

We wandered into an apple store downtown and ended up Skyping with my parents, but we didn't have sound so there was really creative sign language and sign-making until we figured out that Skype has a chatting feature (brilliant!) and had an actual conversation until we were informed that the computer we were using was reserved for lessons. So we sort of got kicked out of the apple store. Oops!

That evening there was a BB King concert at the outdoor arena at the top of the mountain we live on, so Martin and I climbed up with a bunch of our housemates to listen to the show. It was really fun, and they even let us in for the last ten minutes! Pretty good considering that tickets were about 200 Swiss francs.

On Thursday, Martin told us about the free bike rentals at the main train station, so Kira and I collected supplies and headed down in the morning to go on a bike adventure! After a little bit of searching, we found the place and got our excellent 8-speed cruisers (mine was bright green) and we were off!

Our first stop was the Lindt factory on the shores of Lake Zürich. It took us less than an hour to ride there even with pedestrian-dodging while we were still downtown. We got a few truffles, tried all the free samples, and Kira took advantage of the much-reduced factory defects, although we couldn't see anything wrong with the bar she bought.

We stopped by the lake to have some real food for lunch, then decided to ride back to the bottom of the lake then up the other side for a while. In actuality we ended up riding a really long way along the Seestrasse (literally lake road) while we enjoyed the fabulous bike lanes and beautiful scenery.

We eventually stopped in Rapperswill, which is waaaay up at the other end of the lake from Zürich. We had a snack and sat by the lake for a very quick hour, then rode all the way back to the train station so we could meet Martin by 5 to watch a beach volleyball tournament in the train station (inside!). In all, we rode more than 50 miles! We were very happy to watch some beach volleyball before heading up the hill to our house. Thankfully, the concert that night wasn't anyone we had heard of, because I'm not sure I would have made it up the hill.

There's an Ironman race (3ish mile swim, 110 mile bike ride, full 26.2 marathon) in Zürich Sunday (today), and we spent most of our ride on the official course. I have great respect for those racers even more now!

Planes, Trains and Automobiles! Really!

Almost done with Mallorca posts!

We're traveling on a budget, which means that getting to and around the places we go is an adventure in itself sometimes.

We flew RyanAir to Mallorca, and the most convenient airport for that was in Memmingen, Germany. To get there, we drove from Liechtenstein through Switzerland and Austria into Germany, all in the space of an hour and before breakfast. Once we'd landed in Spain we had been in five countries before eleven am! I still can't get over things like that, it would take longer than that just to get out of California from where we live!

In Mallorca, we rented a car and it turned out that the cheapest one was a Smartcar! We had so much fun with that car; it was a parking ninja, the gas mileage was great, and it totally handled the crazy bumpy and windy road up to Alaro. By the end of the trip Martin could parallel park it in the wiggle room other cars left themselves.

BabyCar! Totally owning a tiny parking space, as usual.

 

Martin driving the coastal highway on the West side of the island.

Signs like this at every roundabout made my navigating job really easy. 

The infrastructure on that island is brilliantly designed for tourists. 

Makes sense given that the 8 million annual tourists outnumber actual residents ten to one.

We also had bikes in the apartment, and we (especially I) had tons of fun riding all over the island on those. We would use them to get to Santa Ponca and Peguera to watch Euro 2012 games with the British and German teams, respectively (that was fun, we were always with the home team!), or to get to the bigger beaches. Mallorca is not flat, so it was fun finding the best routes and conquering that one giant hill on the way home.

Obviously Martin's hands-free skills are better than mine since he's riding behind me taking this picture.

Our return trip to Zurich last Thursday was a smorgasbord of transportation methods. We drove the Smartcar to the airport, flew to Germany, drove back through Austria to Liechtenstein; then took a bus to the train station, a train to Zurich, and walked home from the station! It was actually a lovely and relaxed day, we got to stop in Liechtenstein for most of the day, but we actually travelled by plane, train, and automobile! Plus bus and foot! All excellent adventures.

The train! With some gorgeous Alps in the background. Were at one of the train stations in Liechtenstein here.

 

My perfectly RyanAir carryon-sized backpack, thanks to Aunt Margie!

 Also critical for walking home from the train station.

Love Katie

Swimming in the Limmat!

Yesterday we (including Kira and Taryn who are visiting!) went down to the Limmat river to go swimming and had SO much fun!

Unfortunately this isn't us, but you can get an idea!

We went to a spot where you can jump in the river and float down to a grate with ladders on it for climbing out. There's all kinds of infrastructure for swimming, stairs and diving boards and chains along the river walls for hauling yourself upriver if you want to. It's been raining a fair amount so the river is really fast and high, which means we had tons of fun and some exciting dismounts. Water pressure combined with ladder climbing is challenging!

I would have more pictures but we had a storm while we were there so it was pouring rain. That didn't take away from the fun of swimming at all, but it was the first time we've seem Oklahoma levels of rain since being there. I'm weirdly glad, I think I would've missed the intense storms.

River swimming is definitely on my list of things to do every day this summer, I absolutely couldn't get enough of it. It's like a really good watermark but free, without lines, and where they let you do things that would probably be considered too dangerous in the States. It was great!

Love Katie

The West Coast (of Mallorca)

Our last big adventure (apart from the daily toil of finding a new beach, reading a million boSoks, eating lots of insanely cheap produce, playing games, and lying around) was to drive up the West coast of Mallorca to the port city of Soller.

 

We drove along the coast from the bottom star to the top one.

The drive is a lot like Highway 1 in California; we wound through seaside cliffs and got some seriously breathtaking views of the Mediterranean and the coastal mountains and rocks. The biggest difference is that the Pacific (which I love, don't get me wrong) is an angry ocean: it's cold and dark in color and it beats on the shoreline with a sense of purpose. The Mediterranean, by contrast, is warm, turquoise, and placid. The Mediterranean is stand-up paddleboarding in a bikini to the Pacific's surfing in a 5mm wetsuit. Still, both make for amazing vistas.

 We stopped about halfway up at an old guard tower (there's a string along the coast and they could communicate danger by lighting fires like in Mulan. Only the most highbrow of references) and climbed up the hill to look out, and it was the coolest thing. There was a ladder inside the tower and you climbed to the roof to look out! The views were amazing.

Since this is an island, the limited area and challenges of importing food mean that farming were very important. In order to get the most out of the steep land here, everything is terraced with stone walls. Now they're filled with olive trees, almond trees, and grapevines for wine making. It's all very picturesque. Towns are nestled into the hillsides overlooking the sea.

When we got to Soller, we walked around the harbor, checked out the train line that still runs from Palma to Soller (although now it's more of a tourist thing, obviously), and had lunch. Then it was back home on the more direct route, which meant it took about 30 minutes! It would've been 20 if we'd been willing to pay the toll on the tunnel.