When your travel buddy deserts you in the middle of a mountain, you have a choice to make: do you follow her to the local spa to be coddled for the rest of the day, or do you carry on without her?
I chose to carry on.
Poor Jennifer. She didn’t really desert me. She just wasn’t feeling well. We had taken the cable car to the top of Mount Jenner, and halfway down again, hoping to do the last 8.5 km on foot. In her bodily distress, she opted to ride all the way down, but I refused: “No way, not me. I did not come to the Bavarian Alps to do a wussy cable-car descent. I came to hike, and hike I will!”
She waved a cheery good-bye and floated away in her glass carriage, and I confess, I gulped a little. Me – find my way across the mountain and down to Lake Königssee, then catch the boat to Kessel, the bus to Berchtesgaden, and the train to Bad Reichenhall – without my GPS? Or Google maps? Without even my phone to look after me if I get lost? No cell service, no wi-fi, no homing pigeons… just me, a pamphlet, and a series of destinations? Me – the wanderer who can barely get from home to work and back again without an unintentional detour? Without a functioning phone? Not even one?
Yes, me. I can do this. I’m an Adventurous Adult. Continue reading
What I got instead was a whole lot of kitsch: bewigged men in velvet breeches handing out glossy pamphlets advertising cotton-candy concerts in gaudy palaces; church cantors with nasal voices, leading quartets instead of choirs; museum exhibits with nothing but facsimiles and gift shops; and Strauss. Oh, the Strauss. And not the good kind, either. Waltzen-Strauss. Vienna, you and I both know that there’s more to you than triple time, treble clef trinkets and musical ties. But where to find it?