Bregenz

We piled in the car on Saturday and drove 30 miles east to Austria.  The idea of the trip was to do something fun and get a haircut and a tie for Ryan.  We ran out of time to get the haircut, but 2 out of 3 isn't bad.

There is a gondola that takes you to the top of the mountain.  It will take you back down again as well, and I had almost bought a round-trip ticket, but Ryan thought it would be "fun" to walk down.  The person in the office said it would take about an hour and you should have sturdy shoes.   The shoes I had on were sturdy, but not hiking shoes.  Since Ryan doesn't go with us many places, I didn't want to be bossy and make all of the decisions.  Well, inside I did.  But I managed to keep that under wraps (okay--it probably peaked through just a tad) and went ahead and bought the one-way ticket up the mountain.

The views from the top were amazing

There was a great playground at the top as well.

 After we let the kids play on the playground for a while and enjoyed the views from top, we walked down to a small alpine zoo they had.  It was pretty simple with some mountain goats, wild boars, deer, rabbits, etc.  At the end, there was a small stadium area where they do a "birds of prey" show, so we watched that.  It was all in German, so we didn't actually understand anything, but the birds were amazing enough to make up for it--at least for Mason and Katie.  Chloe and Andrew weren't that impressed.

Vultures are surprisingly cute and funny when they aren't circling/picking apart dead animals.

The eagle was the highlight. 

Staying for the bird show put us a little behind schedule. We had to get home at a certain time because we had invited the missionaries from our church over for dinner and we were supposed to pick them up at the train station.  We had one hour to make it down the mountain--so off we went.

Just to make things a little more challenging, we had forgotten our backpack that had our water bottles at home.  The woman at the ticket office said we could by water at the top, so that was our plan.  When we got to the top, I went to buy it and instead of normal water, all they had was mineral water.  In small glass bottles.  For $3 a bottle.  So we got one bottle to share, let each of the kids try mineral water (they won't be requesting it again any time soon) and then refilled it with normal water from an outdoor faucet.  That's all we had between the 7 of us.

Ryan was the only one gung-ho about the forced march down the mountain, so the lack of water gave everyone one more thing to complain about.  My feet hurt bad enough in the shoes I was wearing that I attempted to hike down barefoot--which was just painful in a different way.  But the scenery was beautiful and we built a whole lot of character doing it this way.  So overall, we'll call it a huge success.

We ended up being 15 minutes late to the train station, but everything worked out and we had a great night.  Our one failure of the day was the haircut, but I have some haircutting scissors here--so maybe we'll give that a try for Ryan.  It's been a while since I cut his hair, and I've never done it with just scissors, so wish me luck.  Or maybe he's the one that needs the luck.