Today was happily surreal at times — mountains coming slowly out of hiding, corporate Austria doing something right, and roads far too narrow for traffic going both ways.

Meredith and I had a rough night sleeping — I had a pulled muscle in my neck which was causing a headache and thus a stomachache, and it was really hot in our room. My getting up to get some aspirin woke Meredith up because she was not sleeping well because of the heat. I fixed it by opening the window, which worked, but then the birds woke us up early before dawn, so I closed it again.

We finally woke up for real to the alarm at 8:00 and got ready, including going to the expensive, but convenient, hotel buffet. I then splurged on a taxi to take us the two miles to the car rental place, where a very kind and patient young man got us our car — an Opel five-speed. Once we got underway, we drove the short drive to Hall, where we’ll be staying the next two nights.

Hall is an old salt mining town that has a good-sized old town section. It is located on the Inn River like Innsbruck, and it is surrounded by mountains. We got to our hotel about two hours early, but the room was ready, so they let us in. It is a brand-new room (they came in around 3:00 to put up shelves in the bathroom), located on the third (top) floor with a private balcony overlooking the Inn, the old town, and the mountains beyond. We were delighted.

We crossed over the covered pedestrian bridge to the town, and we explored all of the old town. Though it had not rained all day, the mountains started off the day shrouded in clouds, but while we were in the old town, one mountain came out fully from the clouds, so we grabbed a seat outside at a cafe and ate while soaking in the mountain.

Exploring the old town took a couple of hours (it is not too big, and the main church is closed for renovations), and then we went back to the hotel to regroup. I decided we should check out the Swarovski Kristallwelten (Crystal Worlds). Some background — we saw some billboards in Innsbruck of a giant shrubbery head, with water coming out of its mouth. I thought it was a fantasy picture, and jokingly told Mer it looked like a giant barfing, because that is the quality of humor I aspire to. It turns out the head is real, and when I realized that from a poster today in Hall, I got curious. It turned out to be a park made by the Swarovski Company, which makes crystal. I was skeptical that a commercial company could make anything worthwhile to visit as a tourist attraction, but the website mentioned gardens and art, and I like art in gardens. And I wanted to see the barfing giant.

It was a short drive of about fifteen minutes. We parked in outer Mongolia (or outer Tirol, if you will), because I assumed, wrongly, that the main lot would be full. Ooops. At least the mountains were mostly out from behind the clouds now, so the five-minute walk to the gate was pretty.

We got our tickets and entered the Crystal Worlds just next to and under the giant’s mouth (after the mandatory Meredith picture next to the giant). It was a room full of art showcasing crystals, which were cool, but pretty typical kinds of art. Given the number of tourists who came in with us, I thought it was going to be a long afternoon. But, two things happened — we went into the next room, where the “worlds” actually started, and after just a couple of rooms, we were slow enough that the group left us and went ahead.

The crystal worlds were varied, and each room contained one. Some were good, some amazing, some not so great, but all of them were elaborate and showcasing some use of crystal or drawing on the Swarovski technicians to implement. There was a room with robotic people giving a fashion showcase and dancing — very weird but interesting. The room where I knew I was going to be okay was the crystal dome. You walked inside a huge round room with mirrored facets everywhere. The effect was incredible — and any sound you made came back to you, and localized to you; so I could hear an echo of myself when I spoke, but not when Meredith spoke. The light kept changing in the room, so everything reflected in the room (including us) kept changing. We spent about ten minutes just in that room.

My favorite room was called “Eden.” It was a bronze forest set up in a dimly lit corridor, and the corridor was lined with mirrors. Since the “trees” broke up the direct reflection, you did not immediately see yourself in a bunch of mirrors. Instead, the room gave a very real feeling of being in a huge forest, and I could only make out the mirrors by the line in the floor where the mirror met the floor. It was very effective.

There were about a dozen “worlds” in all, and it was worthwhile. Meredith admitted she was skeptical about the place too since it was a corporate commercial, but she ended up finding it fascinating as well. And all of that was before we got to the gardens, but first we had to get through the gift store, where we managed not to buy (or break) a $17,000 crystal-studded tiger or leopard.

Out on the grounds, we followed a path up to an observation tower that overlooked the shrubbery maze that was shaped like a hand. The mountains were all out now, so it was a great spot. We wandered down to the maze and started taking random paths. We actually ended up finding the center of the maze, quite by accident, and then got back out, with a few wrong turns.

We clambered over and around the outside playground area, which looked like wooded ocean waves, and then we headed into the five-story indoor playground, where “children of all ages” were encouraged to play. Mer was happy because the hostess spoke little English, but very good Italian, so she was able to explain to Meredith how the lockers worked (to store our backpack in) and how we had to take our shoes off. The, we started playing.

The rolling wooden hill was okay, if a little tough in socks — slipping was easy. The FOUR-STORY rope web that we could climb had to be abandoned after I found out that 170 pounds on ropes on bare feet hurt. That was sad. I’m still impressed at a company that can build something that high without giving too much thought to liability.

We liked the trampoline level, and even though the trampolines were small (only about three feet across), they worked surprisingly well. It turns out my sore knee did not like the landing part, so I had to stop. The last level was a giant web — there was no real floor; it was a mesh that looked down on the trampoline level. It was much fun to see parents and grandparents playing with little kids, and we had a good time laughing ourselves.

The last major sight to see was the Crystal Clouds. These were mesh “clouds” filled with crystals that sparkled in the sun and gently banged against each other, making a gentle tinkling sound. There were thirty or more individual clouds, and they were very effective. Many of them were located over a reflecting pool, which must be quite a sight at night (the clouds are lit at night too). You could walk out on a descending ramp into the pond, so that you were waist deep in the water, but completely dry and surrounded by clouds.

So, yes, the place was a giant commercial for the wonders of Swarovski crystal, but they did it very well. We both left impressed. We hiked back to the car, and I took us over to a very small village near Hall, called Thaur.

I found out about Thaur from a tourism pamphlet that Mer happened to grab, and it looked pretty, was close to Hall, and boasted the oldest preserved church in Tirol. We arrived there after a few tight turns on narrow roads, and headed over to the biggest church. We entered through a graveyard, and looked at a few headstones to look at names and dates and the few that had photos on them, and then we headed into the church, which was still open, even at 6:15. The inside was covered in murals, the alter was gilded, and the place was beautiful, all for, as Mer pointed out, a dinky little town in the middle of nowhere. We were not (and still are not) sure that this was the old church, as there were no signs, but since the floor had old gravestones in it, and they were worn almost smooth, we decided to say we had found it.

We left the church and wandered some up toward the mountains toward a small chapel up the hill, and some ruins of an old castle, but I decided to give up, as I was not sure the road we were on went there (it did, as I found out later when I looked it up on a map). Also, it was getting close to 6:30, and we still needed supper.

So, I drove more winding, narrow streets, including a fun encounter with a determined SUV, back to Hall. We walked into Hall from our hotel and grabbed supper at the Goldener Engl, a restaurant my brother recommended from when he was here two weeks ago.

So, we had a good weather and a good-in-general day today. The weather is supposed to be very fine tomorrow, so I am hoping to get up into the mountains to see them up close.

I was momentarily quite angry when Mer’s alarm went off at 7:00 this morning — I could not remember why her alarm would be going off when I was so deep in sleep. I quickly remembered where I was and so that was fine, but it was an indication that my body was still not quite rested.

It was raining and was supposed to rain most of the time at least through early afternoon, but we ate breakfast in the hotel restaurant, where they had an impressive spread for a buffet, including having small Milka chocolate bars. You have to love a country where chocolate bars are considered part of breakfast.

We finished getting ready and headed out into the light Innsbruck rain, looking for Freien Evangelikalen Gemeinde Innsbruck – an evangelical church that has live English translation (as well as Farsi, which is interesting). We did make one wrong turn under my skillful navigation, but while we were pondering our map, we were able to help out a German cyclist who was looking for the River Inn, and could not tell direction because of the lack of sun. Applaud the power of paper maps! At any rate, we did finally find the church, about five minutes after the start of service. I was fairly amused that the church met on the third floor of a building that housed a pool hall.

The service was excellent. They had maybe 75 people there, and we were later told that the church had attendees from 20-25 countries. The service was conducted in German for the most part, and the over-headsets English translation was used as the lingua franca for the rest of the congregation (except for the Farsi speakers, who had their own translation). Many of the songs sung had some English verses, and one was entirely in English. Of the ones that were in German, most were German translations of songs we sing back in New Baltimore, so we knew the tunes well, so we could concentrate on trying to sing the German words being projected in the front of the church. Meredith did better with that than I did, but that is okay.

We had to concentrate on the sermon, as it turns out to be difficult to hear someone speaking quiet English in your ear as someone else speaks full-volume German. Of course, having to concentrate is not a bad thing when you are trying to pay attention. The sermon text was based on the exchange in Mark 10 in which Peter points out that the disciples had left everything for Jesus. Jesus replies that any who leave mother and brothers and homes will gain a hundred mothers and brothers and homes in the life to come. So, the sermon was that even if it can be hard to give up things for Jesus (like jobs or friends), it is worth it in the end. The pastor told of his own experience of leaving a bank job right after getting married, in order to go to seminary. Some of his friends thought he was crazy, and they drifted away. He himself did not know how he was going to make ends meet, but he said that in retrospect it has been easy to see how it was worth it. It was a good mixture of scripture and personal testimony, and worth hearing.

We chatted with the pastor and then the assistant pastor and then the piano player, all of whom were very friendly and spoke good or even excellent English. We think one of the great ways to experience local culture in a foreign country is to go to church, and this was a great experience. It was also a good reminder that God does not just speak English and love America. He is a little bigger than that….

We walked the twenty minutes back to the hotel in the still-light rain. I did some quick research on some things to do that would be indoors, and I settled on the Museum of Tyrolean Regional Heritage and the connected Court Church where Emperor Maximilian’s impressive (but empty) tomb monument is located.

The museums are in the old town area, and we were getting quite good at navigating that part of Innsbruck. The museum is excellent — it is three floors of well-laid-out exhibits. The first floor featured Tyrolean hand-carved nativity scenes. There were about twenty of them in all, so it made comparison very easy. Some were just three figures (Jesus, Mary, and Joseph), while some were very elaborate, with Tyrolean landscapes and dozens of figures. Many of the nativity scenes dated back to the 1800s or earlier, but they also included several from 1950 and on. They also put the viewer in one room “inside” a nativity set by using a projected film of a standard set being assembled, and the film covered three walls. It was quite effective.

The second floor had two major exhibits. One was a series of complete “Stube” rooms, about a dozen in all. Stube rooms were wood-paneled rooms with a ceramic stove in the corner. These rooms were used for family life and social occasions, and the stove was fed from the other side of the wall from the kitchen to keep the stube clear of smoke. Seeing a dozen of the rooms in quick succession gave us a good chance to compare the simpler ones with the more elaborate ones, and we felt like we got a good look at a small part of the Tyrolean culture.

The other major exhibit on the second floor was a church calendar carved in stone tiles on the floor that went around three sides of the museum courtyard. For each church holiday, there was a folk exhibit; it could be art of a saint, or farm tools for harvest, or costumes for a parade, but each was tied to the time of year suggested by the church calendar. It was a fascinating way to lay out the exhibit.

The third floor had exhibits dedicated to the folk arts (wood carving, iron making, furniture making, etc.), as well as some folk costumes from Tyrol from the past. The major exhibit on the third floor was dedicated to the issue of life and death and folk responses to these. So, it started with birth and the charms and folk customs associated with a safe birth. It progressed throughout life and included death and the customs around that. As you came to the end of the exhibit (death) a door automatically opened and if you went through it it led to a high vantage point behind the crucifix in Court Church. That was very cool.

We left the museum itself and went over to the church. The exhibit there started with a fun introduction to Emperor Maximilian. You sat in a room full of portraits of Maximilian, and a recorded narrator told us of some facts of his life. Then a door opened up on its own and we moved to the next room, where the voice talked about the Renaissance and Austria’s place in world politics during the time of Maximilian. Another door then opened up on its own and we went into a room that talked about Maximilian’s death. The entire thing was a smaller-scale Disney-style exhibit, and we loved it.

We wandered into the church itself, where the tomb is located. It is indeed very impressive. It is massive, and surrounded by twenty or more statues of people Maximilian admired or was friends with. The entire tomb took over 100 years to build, long after Maximilian died. He has never been moved from his original burying place of Wiener Neustadt in lower Austria, so the elaborate tomb is empty. One of the statues around the tomb is of King Arthur, so I got a picture of him with Meredith; the story is that Mer’s parents were going to name her Arthur had she been a boy, without realizing his name would have been Arthur King. I am fond of that story.

Maximillan was an interesting man. When he died, on his own orders, his head was shaved, all his teeth were knocked out, his body was flogged, and then covered in lime. He wanted to show how he did not want to hang on to his body and he wanted to repent from the sins he committed in the body. At the same time, he ordered the construction of one of the most elaborate tombs I have ever seen.

After we finished with the museums around 3:00, the rain had finally stopped, so I wanted to get into the mountains, a least a little. We headed over to the Innsbruck funicular (steep mountain train), which we took up to Hungerburg at 2,800 feet. We could have paid to take a cable car up even higher, but the mountain was in clouds, so we were content to look out over Innsbruck.

Almost. I decided we should take a hike up there, and so we did, even though it was uphill for fifteen minutes. I had hoped it would lead to some great views, but the mountain forest closed in almost immediately, and so after fifteen minutes, we turned around and headed back to the funicular station. After some leisurely gazing over the town, we took it back to the terminal near the old town. Before heading into the old city for supper, we trekked across the street and around the Imperial Gardens. They were very pretty, and we got to see some older men playing life-sized chess. It was only a short walk around the gardens, but it certainly woke my appetite. We found an Italian restaurant in the old town, where we had supper.

It started to rain again lightly as we walked back to the hotel, and since we were both still a bit tired from the trip over to Austria, we called it a night even though it was only 7:00. I drew Meredith a bath and started blogging. I’m hoping to be less shocked when the alarm goes off tomorrow.

Nowadays Meredith and I always fly out of Toronto when we fly to Europe. It is only about five hours away, and it not only costs much less than Cleveland, Pittsburgh, or Detroit, but it offers non-stop flights to most western European destinations. Like Munich. Even though we were aiming for Austria, flying into Munich from Toronto was much cheaper than flying to Vienna, Austria.

The one major downside to flying out of Toronto is that five-hour distance. When you add on the recommended three-hour arrival buffer for international flights, AND you add in the innate Riordan desire to arrive at least an hour earlier than recommended, AND you add in Riordan paranoia about traffic and border crossings and alien invasions and moose crossings, you (meaning me) arrive at the reasonable desire to leave a full twelve hours before your flight leaves at 8:10 pm.

We did not quite make that, leaving home around 9:00 am, but I compensated for that by deciding that lunch and supper should be combined into one meal at the airport itself. Genius! So, of course, after little traffic and an easy border crossing into Canada, we arrived at the airport in Toronto around 2:30 pm. For an 8:10 flight. Um. Yeah.

Still, it was not all bad in that I was relaxed about the time, even when we hit a huge line to drop bags off. I had checked in online, so I thought things would be easy, and they should have been — the line moved along quickly, and I got to a baggage tag kiosk that then promptly told me that it could not help me and directed me to another line to talk to a ticket agent. This line did not move along quite so well, but that was okay, given the five-plus hours we had. We got our bags taken care of, including being complimented by the ticket agent on our packing light, and we headed to security. Where there was a jaw-droppingly huge line. In fact, it turned out to be the biggest airport security line I have ever been in, taking us slightly over a full hour to get through. Who was being paranoid now? It took us over three hours to get from our car to our gate, so if we had showed up as recommended, it would have been very tight.

And, the generous three hours we had at the gate allowed for an expensive airport meal. Meredith was happy to get the Canadian equivalent of chili fries, which is poutine fries, which were covered in gravy, bacon, onions, and cheese curds. I had a more normal burger.

The flight was fine — smooth and uneventful. There was a vast movie selection (I went for Zootopia and Hail, Caesar!), and I even managed to sleep for about an hour and a half, which is not usual for me on a plane.

So we arrived in Munich. Baggage claim and passport control were a breeze — the easiest I have ever experienced, including walking up to the baggage carousel and grabbing our bags that were right in front of us — no waiting at all.

We found the train station with no issues and ran into our first challenge — buying a train ticket. There were touch-screen kiosks, and even English instructions, but we still did not understand everything we were looking at. I punched some buttons and got something that looked right for getting to Innsbruck, but the system would not take our credit card. An Austrian man came over and said something in German. We shrugged and asked if he spoke English, and he said he spoke a little. He then asked where we were going and took charge, punching buttons in a rapid manner and taking our cash (“No card!”) and giving us a ticket. He then held out his hand. I gave him two Euros ($2.50) and we jumped on the train just as it was about to pull out. That was kind, if a little self-interested, of the man, but we still had no idea what we were doing or what kind of ticket we had.

Meredith wisely scoped out a college-aged woman and asked if she spoke English. She did, and she was very helpful and kind. It turns out the man had bought us a ticket to the last town in Germany on the way to Innsbruck, and we could buy the remaining leg of the trip there. She was getting off at the same stop we needed to get off at to catch the southern train, and she printed us a schedule from a machine and got us pointed in the right direction. I am always grateful for the kindness of strangers.

And so, after another transfer and another kind man confirming we were on the right train platform, and after managing to more or less fight sleep for two-plus hours on a very scenic train ride, we arrived in Innsbruck. It was raining lightly as we arrived, but it stopped as we left the station. Along the way we were coincidentally greeted by a Vespa scooter parade — odd things like this are some of the joys of traveling.  We made our way to our fun and funky boutique hotel (the Nala Hotel in Innsbruck — http://www.nala-hotel.at/en/), where we checked in and collapsed in bed. It was 3:00 pm local time, or 9:00 am back home — we had been in motion for 24 hours).

Years ago, Mer came up with a great way to beat jet lag and still enjoy the first day of touring — nap when you get to the hotel for two or three hours, then go to bed that evening at a normal time. It really works — the nap gives you enough rest to get through the remaining four or five hours of the day without feeling exhausted, and you can use those hours to do light touring (eating out and walking around the city).

So, we had a good Austrian meal next to the old town section of Innsbruck, and then we walked down both sides of the River Inn for a few blocks. When we got back to the the old town, we wanted to grab some ice cream, so we went back to the main shopping street, where we heard a piano player singing songs in English (he was quite good) and then a huge cheer. We investigated, and it was a public stage where hundreds of people were watching the EuroCup soccer match of Austria versus Portugal. That was fun to have a public viewing space like that, as well as all of the bars.

We grabbed some ice cream, and then wandered the city for awhile more, finding our way back to the hotel and then back to the old town area near the river to see if we could see any solstice fires in the mountains. Setting bonfires in the mountains on or about the solstice is a tradition in the area, but we did not see any for sure; we thought maybe one light in the mountains could be a fire, but it was not obvious. We are still hoping to catch some over the next few days.

So, we made our tired way back to the hotel, where I drew a bath for Meredith in our room’s very deep tub, and I blogged about the day. It was a smooth start to our Austrian Adventure.