Holidays in Innsbruck (THROWBACK POST, THIS HAPPENED 3 MONTHS AGO)

Oh yes, this one is way overdue. So late that it kind of falls into the "do it before it is pointless" zone. So here we are: Christmas with the cousins in Berlin and then retreating to the mountains of Austria for a week of exploring and seeing some friends from Italy.

Berlin's Gendarmenmarkt Christmas Market

Open carriage ride around town (our gift to the family).

Christmas night: room full of presents yet kids prefer to crowd around a game on the iPad.

After a few days in Berlin we hit the train south to Austria.

Saving up!!

Hiking the Nordkette ridge above Innsbruck. Way above.

From the town hall tower.

We spent the week in Tulfes at an inn run by a wonderful Swiss couple. We spent our days touring Innsbruck, nearby small towns of Hall and Wattenberg. Extensive hiking trails link the smaller towns up and down the valley so we got a chance to spend some time on those. Evenings we took over the tables in their quiet bar area and sat everyone down to a big table and family meal which worked out much better than cramming people into our kitchenette suite.

Nordkette and Innsbruck from Bergisel, the Olympic Ski Jump

Cousins and Luca in Hall's Altstadt

Jay joins the Italians on the Stubaier Glacier for some turns

Bergisel Olympic Ski Jump

We also had time to spend with wonderful old friends Elena and Franco from Italy. One aspect of this was caravaning up and down the Innsbruck valley in their Zafira minivan, which provided a front row seat to occasionally spirited and entertaining Italian-style conversations. In many cases, the flavor of the interaction was that of a typical husband/wife chat about driving. It is of the type that has characterized nearly every relationship since the introduction of the internal combustion engine: Male driver makes wrong turn irrationally while female navigator scolds. Since Italian men are mostly beyond reproach when it comes to driving, this requires diverging viewpoints from other vehicle occupants to be communicated in an even more spirited manner.

I love Italians in that they have daily animated conversations that sound slightly dangerous. One way to temper the energy of the exchange is the use of fond words for each other. A good example is the word "Tesoro." It means "treasure" in Italian and is a term of endearment. Many times we heard how Franco is viewed as a treasure. Frequently his treasured status was communicated at high volume, usually as we missed another turn-off.

By the end of the week, the previously lovey-dovey term "Tesoro" seemed to be a little bit closer to "Blockhead." But this is just how things sound to our ears, which are not accustomed to such amazing exchanges.

(roughly translated from Italian)

We are driving down Autobahn and approaching clearly-marked exit.

Elena: Here comes our turn.

Franco: Are you sure?

E: Of course I am sure.

Driving down Autobahn and nearing the clearly-marked exit.

E: Here it is, get off here.

F: Here?

E: YES. Here!!

F: No, I think this just wraps around and backtracks.

E: No it does not Tesoro! Take this exit!!

F: The next one is the correct one.

Drive by the exit.

E: You missed the exit!! Why didn't you turn?

F: What, and hit that cow?

E: What cow? Tesoro, now we are lost forever!

Etc etc

This whole endeavor was a wonderful Christmas present from Rocky and Colleen, who have been structuring family trips since before husbands like Rucker and I even showed up. They have amazing energy to chase around the world and keep the grandkids entertained - this requires doing a lot of things that perhaps the older you get the less inclined you are to engage in. Like playing "leg ram" with Cody, who lines up at the other side of the room, lowers his head, and rushes at you to strike heavily into your thigh in hopes of knocking your legs out from under you. Or the getting up early to read to nickering children who are in a new exciting place and just want to rage against any authority figure. Or taking everyone ice skating and sitting outside freezing while the kids stumble around and crash into people.

These are wonderful memories to make for grandparents. The scale is quickly tipping though: as we get older the kids also get more dangerous and destructive. While I enjoy wrestling with them on the floor, it is more and more a good idea to do so with some sort of head protection. Also, wrapping yourself in blankets and pillows will help diffuse the blunt force trauma that results from two boys bending their will to a full-on tickle monster battle. They do not hold anything back no matter who they are working over. Outside of wrestling battles, there is the playing with/dropping of knives at mealtime, the general noise level (screeching, screaming up and down the Pension hallways) and screams of pain, real and imagined, that result from scrapes with cousins.

It is a lot for an adult to manage this, even sprightly adults. I believe that on this trip, the grandparents may have realized that in addition to grandkid memories and beautiful scenery, another potential outcome of these trips could be their untimely deaths. I think this myself sometimes when I get an unexpected knee to my temple during a wrestle match, or watch as Cody comes to join the wrestle melee gripping a long-tined steak carving fork, assuring me that he'll be super careful with it.

So this makes it all the more impressive, this thing that Nanny and Poppy do, tirelessly, for us.

Guest blogger Jay Boynton kept a trip journal when he was last in Innsbruck, at age 20 while backpacking around Europe. Unfortunately there are no photos from that trip that have survived due to my inability to understand shutter speeds with the camera I had at the time. But here are some comments from the 20 year-old pen on his first international eye-opening trip:

12 July 1990

The city is set right under the Nordkette Tyrolean Alps and thus is a very pretty area. I walked down Maria Theresia Strasse and gaped all the way - the same view was on a poster in the Irvin Language ab back at Miami University. Heavy, dude. My room was a hole in the wall with a sink. I dropped everything there except the camera and map and set out to explore Innsbruck.

Visited the Olympic Museum inside the Goldenes Dachl commemerating the 1964 & 1976 Olympic Games here. Hung out in the Altstadt, much better than Basel's or Zurich's, and then went up the StadtTurm for a view of the city, realizing again that the immense Nordkette really makes it.

Somewhere along the way I had lunch then took a bus to the cog railway, the railway to teh cable car, and the cable car to to the Seegrube station. Cows grazing all around stroll through the terrace that overlooks the city, their bells clanging away. I saw one approach thisi man who was enjoying the view. The cow looked right at him and "mooed" loudly. I laughed!

I hiked up the mountain from the cafe through more cows, then sat on a rock, took some pictures and reflected on the trip and life in general. Then I hiked up further than the cows, found some sort of a tower, climbed it, and took more pictures. All I could hear was the fresh Alpine wind and the cowbells. All was at peace.

Took the 8pm cable car back down the mountain for a pizza and beer at the base of the lift. I shared a car with a family with two kids, about 8 and 9. I thought wow this will be me in a few years. I will subject my family to Jay's European Vacation..I hope I don't become the average tourist with the video camera and the flower print shirt. That will suck if that happens.

Then I discovered that I missed the last cog railway down to the city by 40 minutes after my pizza and beer. So instead of hiking down the winding roads all the way back, I  jumped the fence, scrambled through someone's backyard and lowered myself over the abutment onto the high degree slope of the incline rails. Off I went! I made it back to the town in 1/2 the time it would have taken otherwise!

Returning about 9:30pm I went back out to explore Innsbruck's nightlife in the Altstadt. Great place if you are with people but largely sucks by yourself. Sidewalk cafes and bars teem with people and many quiet sidestreets split off for endless strolling possibilities. For future reference, NEXT TIME HERE BRING WOMAN."

History Lesson!

So the Austro-Hungarian Empire ruled this area for hundreds of years that the Habsburg family line persisted. It all came to an inglorious end in 1918 with their defeat at the end of WWI, as they joined the demise of two other family dynasties of the Hohenzollerns (Germany) and the Romanovs (Russia) in an event later referred to as the "Fall of Eagles." They all had eagles on their family crests.

But before all that, Habsburg Innsbruck sat at a trading crossroads about halfway between Verona and Munich. Traders coming over Brenner Pass from Italy came through the town and as a result it grew in influence. It was named capital of the Tyrol region in 1429 and saw further progress when emperor Maximilian I lived there in the late 1490's.

Walking through the churches and surviving 15th century buildings I was enchanted, as I was the first time I came here, by the onion domes on the churches set against the forbidding and beautiful mountain backdrops. It is easy to make the jump to thinking of this place back when it was all about swords and emperors and animal husbandry. The middle ages were not just dirty little villages limping along from one plague epidemic to the next...In certain places they were movie sets for the Lord of the Rings!

If you had to live in the Middle Ages, do it near the mountains where at least you can feel like you are in a movie set. (While you spend most of the year freezing your ass off since central heating is not really a "thing" yet.)

End of the week saw people scattering back over various horizons. We trained it to Munich. On the Austria - German border we saw no-nonsense German border police physically pulling unregistered refugees off our train in a case of racial profiling in the truest sense of the term! Lots of people are trying to sneak into Germany through Austria so they are hyper - aware. Germany is taking the lion's share of refugees seeking to come into Europe, but if you try to get in outside the typical channels, you are really asking for it. As we saw!

And with that, we rushed into 2016.