It’s all starting to blur together in my mind already. I woke up this morning in my own bed and found myself back in the office at my normal hour, dangerously close to my normal routine. That was a short jaunt…

I’m happy to pronounce the trip a complete success. We did what we set out to do and got where we wanted to go. We started in Vienna, went to Innsbruck, Munich, Budapest, and back to Vienna all according to the rough plan that we had left with. I came back with six bottles of wine, including three bottles of the prized Liszt Kekfrankos that I’d been craving since I left Budapest a year ago. Unfortunately, I came back with a bit of a cold and a voice that could sand down wooden planks (I blame the saunas in Budapest…going from a super-hot sauna stright into 16 degree celcius water is great for the skin, but horrible for the immune system).

It was really a mindtrip to be back in Budapest again, staying in my old hostel, wandering my favorite streets. As much as I wanted to, I never expected that I’d return to Budapest so soon. I didn’t get to see much more than I did last time though–most of my time was returning to my favorite spots and wandering around areas of the city to see what had changed. I really wanted to go Margaret Island, an island on the Danube sandwiched between the northern areas of Buda and Pest. I’d also love to do some day trips to some of the surrounding areas, including the beautiful Lake Balaton to the southwest that I had trained past at sunset a year ago on my first trip.

In other words, my trip was too short, but then again, aren’t they always? I could have spent another week in Budapest and after that, another two weeks exploring the countryside. Really, at the end of the day, the Earth is quite simply, big.

This was my first time traveling in a group and I was very pleased with how everything turned out. Lots of crazy and fun things happened that I never would have gotten traveling alone. Group dynamics and the effects of prolonged time exposure are always unknown quanities with any group and we all made it home alive without killing each other and on great terms. There’s definitely a few knobs to tweak if we do this again in terms of preferences and duration–I think in the future I’ll be sticking strictly with the smaller hostels (we did about a 50/50 split of big party vs. small cozy hostels) and trying to spend more time at any given place.

For now, it’s back to the grinding stone. I’ve got deadlines coming up fast. The pictures are pretty good and I’ll be triaging through them sometime this week to post them.

T-Shirt Slogan of the Day: I went skiing in the Austrian Alps and I got 0wned.

The crew hit up the Axamer Lizum resort in the hills above Innsbruck, which officially made the fifth present and future Olymipic sites. Today’s dose of skiing was likely the best skiing I’ve ever done, with a combination of groomed runs, fine fresh powder, and challenging terrain. It was also cheap! I’ve had this notion for years that skiing in Europe has prohibitively expensive, but we discovered it to be quite a bit cheaper than our US equivelents…lift plus good rental gear cost 50 EUR, which is a far cry from the $100/day amounts we’re used to paying at Whistler.

I took an amazing spill today, the likes of which have not been since since I was learning how to ski as a wee lad. Two words: Yard Sale. Making tracks through some powdered streches, I started picking up some speed as I ran through a gully bewtween two sets of rocks. As I came around the corner, something happened, because the next thing I know, I’m faceplanted, snow down my back, skis five feet behind me, and a pole ten feet up the mountain. Hence the slogan, “I went skiing in the Austrian Alps and got 0wned.”

We’ve successfully plowed through the bionic part of our tour and we’ve made it to Munich, where we’ll be settling in for the next couple days before heading to Budapest. 

So a few posts down, I wrote about “Giving Vienna” and planning a trip with four friends to Europe. We arrived yesterday after spending about 13 hours in flight and we’re having an awesome time. This is my first real vacation since I’ve started working where I haven’t been checking email and keeping up with affairs in the office. Eating dinner at a nice restaurant called Huth near the center of town, we all commented how nice it was to relax and not thing about work (or anything) for the first time in months.

I’ve certainly felt a sense of homecoming and peace by slinging a backpack on again and returning to the hostel life. I’ve missed this sort of traveling more than I could ever explain here…it’s very refreshing to live life out of a bag again.

All of us got up pretty early…we walked out the hostel around 8:00a, rare and unheard of in the backpacking realm. Vienna has been a little colder than expected for us and Bo, Bede, and David spent time in the local REI-equivalent buying base layers.

Bram is kicking me off by countdown…more later!