Having a GPS for Europe is a wonderful thing, especially in Austria, where it has been very accurate. Last year, in the Balkans, the GPS usually got you in the general area, but you had to do some guessing. None of that this year. The fun with the GPS, though, is that it generally wants to take the shortest route, even if that route more or less resembles a driveway or a cowpath. We had a good distance of our route today on a scenic one-way road, and the last part leading up to the lake town of Hallstatt was very winding. Still, the GPS did get us to our B and B, where we checked in and dropped our stuff, and Meredith took a few minutes to plan.

The forecast was calling for thunderstorms tonight, or possibly sooner, and for rain for much of tomorrow. Mer had to quickly rethink her plans to take advantage of the clear, if hot, weather today. She made up her mind, and we went off along more winding roads and up and up to Gosausee, which is an Alpine lake which has a trail of three miles or so that goes all around it. Mer wanted to hike it.

The setting is spectacular — the lake is surrounded by towering mountains, and even a cliff that comes down to the lake. One of the mountains on the far side of the lake is home to a small glacier, which was easily visible today. We set off in a clockwise direction around the lake at a very leisurely pace. It was hot, but the mountains and the forests kept us in shadow a lot, and it turns out that snow-melt mountain streams carry a lot of cold air down the mountain with them, which was amazing to feel as you walked through it.

The walk was very pretty, and as we were in no hurry, we sat on a bench to take it all in. Then we found a place that went down to the lake edge, and Meredith dipped her toes in; I decided to wait for a later opportunity since I did not want wet feet in my shoes for the whole walk.

Then we came across the mad people. There were dozens of them, men and women, clinging like flies to the edge of the cliff we came across. It seems some people think clinging to the side of a sheer cliff is fun. I think we came across a climbing school, which had a very elaborate rock trail set up, with safety lines for attaching to, vertical stretches on built-in ladders, rungs hammered into the rock for footholds, and even a double wire “bridge” (one wire to walk on and one to hold on to) that crossed open space between cliff faces. It was an unexpected and impressive sight that we stayed to watch awhile, and one we could still see from the other side of the lake when we got over there.

We circled around the far end of the lake, enjoying the smells of the pines, even though they ended up being in the way of the lake and mountain views. As we came around the end, we started coming across snow-melt streams, some very small, and some fairly large. At the first one we came to, which was a couple of feet across, I took off my shoes and socks and stuck my feet in. It. Was. Cold. It was the kind of cold that makes your feet hurt in about ten seconds. It was the kind of cold that can only come from water that was snow a few hours before. So of course, I stuck my feet in a couple of times. My feet were cool for several hundred yards of walking after that.

We continued along the trail in an unhurried manner, stopping off down at the lakeside again to take some pictures. We started finding large dung on the trail, which made us a little anxious about bears and all the signs in German that we could not read but that seemed emphatic. We eventually came across a half-dozen cows in a small meadow, and so we ended the bear threat.

It was a perfect outing — it was soul-soothing and beautiful and mellow, much needed after the hectic day in Salzburg on Friday. We sat on a bench near the entrance of the trail and relaxed before going back to the car and driving back to Hallstatt.

Back in Hallstatt, we walked to a nearby supermarket to grab snacks, since we had skipped lunch. We then walked through the cute main street area before we headed up and up to the Catholic church in the town, which has a commanding view. Additionally, it has an interesting graveyard with (mostly) carved wooden grave markers. Since space was crowded in Hallstatt, bodies only stayed in the grave for ten or twelve years before being dug up to make room for the newly dead. So, there are not many old markers in the graveyard, although the digging-up of bodies for space has gone away since the Catholic church started allowing cremation in the 1960s.

So, where did the dug-up bones end up? In the basement of the small chapel on the grounds, dedicated to St. Michael. In the charnel house, there are several hundred decorated skulls arranged around the room, sitting above stacked bones. The skulls are decorated with paintings of flowers, as well as the name of the deceased and the years of birth and death. Meredith and I both have a fascination with crypts and the like, so we spent several minutes in the room before visiting the small but pretty chapel above. The preaching lectern was huge, taking up a good quarter of one wall.

We walked around the church, happening to catch the end of a wedding in the Protestant church below; we think they set off a cannon three times while we were in the tomb below the main church, which was an alarming place to be when hearing cannon fire. We went in the church itself and looked around, and finished off by wandering the graveyard and looking at all of the individual touches on the graves and grave markers.

We walked back down to the main street and back to our B and B before going and getting pizza for supper. We were both hammed and fried out after a week of fried foods and ham. We got back to our room and had a good time watching the storm move in over and around the mountains. The clouds moved up and down different mountains as the wind blew. It was very pretty to see from inside a safe and dry room.