Lucky Nuts In Berlin: Family time in Austria

This is my favorite photo from the trip. The kids got to swim that first evening
after our long train ride from Berlin.

We hadn't finished unpacking from our month in the US when it was time to pack up again, this time for a 5 day trip to Austria to spend time with Dan's aunt and uncle. We have a close relationship with them, having stayed in their home twice before and spent several days with them earlier this year on our ski trip. They consider Dan like a son; he lived with them twice during his childhood for about 6 months each time. And so our kids are like their grandkids and they spoil them rotten.

The kids love Hedi for many reasons, not the
least of which is she buys them chocolate
for breakfast. This is the cereal she bought for
us: chocolate wafers filled with Nougat!

Hedi and Helmut live in Pasching, near Linz, Austria. They keep a camper on a nearby lake called the Ausee (pronounced Ow-say), and that is where we stayed for this trip.

Hedi kept the refrigerator stocked for us, and we had eggs and sweet breads with juice and coffee each morning for breakfast. In typical Austrian fashion we had huge hot meals for lunch and then small dinners in the evenings, or sometimes just tea and cake if lunch had been particularly large. We went out to eat for lunch one day and I ordered schnitzel (flattened, breaded and fried pork) because it's hard to pass up a good schnitzel, but when the food orders came I saw that Hedi had ordered something I had also considered on the menu and I asked if I could have a bite.

Carter ordered a cup of hot chocolate that was literally as
big as his head

She immediately insisted on trading with me and I ended up eating her whole plate of food. It was something that loosely translates as a "lumberjack plate", intended for large men who have spent the day slaving away in heavy manual labor. By contrast I had slept late, had breakfast, and gone for a drive to reach this restaurant about an hour away. The meal had seriously about an entire package of bacon cooked to crispy and spread over 2 large pork cutlets with caramelized onions. It was to die for, literally, because I'm sure my arteries became several millimeters more constricted after consuming almost the entire plate. Man, was it good! I didn't need dinner that night.

We had planned to hang out at the lake all day every day, swimming and playing in the sand. But the weather didn't cooperate with us so well. Whereas it had been upwards of 90 degrees the whole prior week, the week of our visit was wet and cool. It rained at least a little nearly every day and while the water temperature wasn't too bad, the air was too cool to really enjoy hanging out at the lake. We were warm enough as long as we were moving around in the water and climbing in and out to jump in, but if you didn't keep moving it got too cold. We ended up spending a lot of time in the camper playing board games. We had brought some with us, and we also ended up playing some games that Dan's cousin's kids had. One of them, a teenage boy named Christian, spent a lot of time with Carter and Haley playing games. It was nice to have him there.

Sorry! with Christian and Hedi. The kids are enjoying
chocolate ice cream, courtesy of Hedi

Christian and Hedi speak good English but are far more comfortable with German, and Helmut doesn't really speak English, so the four of us tried to speak mostly in German during our visit. It was interesting to see the kids interacting with Christian over the games. Both of them had studied "game play" in German class last year, so they knew how to say "your turn", "my turn", etc. Dan of course can carry on a conversation, but I stayed silent until I had something I knew how to say. After 3 or 4 days my brain was exhausted and I was really tired of trying to communicate in German. It definitely made me realize how different our lives would be here if we weren't surrounded by so much English. On the one hand I think life would have been a lot more silent and I would have felt a lot more isolated. But on the other hand that silence wouldn't have lasted too long. Had we been immersed in German for this first year we would be able to communicate very well by now. Even after 5 days of immersion we had all made progress. The last day we were there another of Dan's cousins came to visit with her family. The kids played Uno Extreme while the adults sat around chatting. It was mentally exhausting but I was surprised to discover that I understood most of what was being said. Not every word, but I mostly got the main points.

"Flying" on the swings

The first day we were there we went to an odd little tourist attraction that was a combination of education, kid activities and modern art. It was called Höhenrausch, something about the thrill of heights. The theme was birds and there was a lot of abstract bird art as well as activities related to flying. We rode on flying swings and the kids did one of those trampoline bungee things. There was also a tower to climb, with exhibits on local birds on the way up and a nice view of Linz from the top.

Bird art

Looking out at Linz

Modern art: Hundreds of plastic eggs lined up under incubating lights, watched over by a gigantic chicken eye. From the website, “With his Cosmopolitan Chicken Project (CCP), [the Belgian artist] uses the chicken as a metaphor for observations on “la condition humaine.” The installation New Brood stands for the potential of unborn life and the complex relationships between nature, evolution and human influence. Hmmmm....

Racing down the sled track

The day we drove an hour away into the Alps and ate huge amounts of food, we also went to the Wurbauerkogel, a place with a summer downhill sled track as well as an alpine coaster. The sled was really fun, the coaster was fun but too short. That was Dan's birthday so we also celebrated with cake later in the day.

Whee!!

Alpine coaster track

Happy birthday to Dan!

Saturday was finally a nice day and we swam for a long time and tried out the jumping platforms. The kids were brave and both of them jumped from the tallest platform. It was tall enough that you had time on the way down to think about the fall and to feel your stomach flying up into your head. I did back flips off the low platform which was fine until I threw my back out. Ugh, my body isn't what it used to be! It's been almost a week and I'm still recovering. All in all it was a really nice way to end the summer. We have been unpacking and laying low this week, getting ready for school to start on Monday!