Oztal Valley Weekend

This past weekend was President's Day weekend, so we took advantage of the 3 day and made a 4 day vacation down to the Oztal Valley of Austria again and met up with Stephen and Kris. We planned on skiing 2 of the days and climbing 2, but ended up climbing 3 and skiing just 1, plus we added in some swimming and sledding and hiking. Quite a packed full weekend. I am learning to snowboard and started off on my own while Steph and Frank went off together. I spent about 2 hours forgetting how to make turns and kept switching from riding goofy to right always on my back edge almost! So stupid. When I met back up with Frank and Steph, Frank was in bad shape. He took a face first dive into the snow when they hit some really chunky hard as rock blocky snow. His goggles probably saved his face, but cracked and the plastic tore into his forehead as you can see in the pics. Ow. We ended the day early needless to say.

Fortunately, every day was totally sunny!! Frank found the bouldering around Tumpen by looking online at blogs and websites and figuring it all out and then hunting. We went with him to boulder on Sunday and then climbing at Engelswand (a klettergarten (climbing garden)) near Tumpen in full sun! It was great. Felt so warm. We sat on our pads and ate lunch and tried a few easy climbs out that were not so easy for us since we're not used to granite. We also went to this really awesome spa/sauna place called Aqua Dome with heated outdoor pools and a cool slide and stuff and a sauna side with a steam room and more outdoors pools, only naked. That really freaked me out and felt so weird to do! Naken bodies everywhere of all ages and sizes. Not a fan of that part. Just seems weird to me that its okay to be naked in front of one another at a spa and odd if you try to cover yourself, when any other place and time its totally uncool and embarassing. Stupid if you ask me and just a way for everyone to check out naked people secretly. However, the saunas and stuff are super nice!

Tuesday we had the greatest time. We hiked up into the mountains in Gries on a hut hike road that is all grated just for sledding! Its a really big thing in Austria. We hiked up to a hut and had lunch and a beer and then sledded down with the dogs. So fun. Gotta be a way to open something like this up in the states.

Its time for dinner now and Maya is whining constantly for me to feed her, so I am giving in.