As the Wind Blows

Somewhere between Southern Germany and Northern Austria is my favourite part of the world. I have yet to find the exact place and I look forward to discovering it one day.  After all my moping around London for the previous month, I think it was worth it coming to this part of the world again. Now I’ll just have to visit this area in winter and learn how to ski and snowboard properly because they seem to have amazing, if not scary, ski runs everywhere.

So I was only in Austria for one night – the joys of a coach trip – which was probably longer than the eight hours on my previous visit. Again I can’t comment all that much on the place, except the scenery from the coach windows looked amazing and Innsbruck is quite a quaint little town.

The memory that will stand out for me is that after then 40mins free time we had to explore Innsbruck during the evening (don’t ever do a coach trip in Europe when it’s not daylight savings otherwise you’ll end up seeing everything under artificial light), we lost two old ladies. It’s interesting because the main square is really quite small and the majority of the people that were there were tour groups coming for a gander at the golden balcony. So between tour groups it’s really quite empty at that time of the evening and it’s a wonder that the two ladies simply vanished.

Personally, and automatically I blamed the tour guide because she had almost left me behind in Rothenburg (not that I would’ve particularly minded) and it was lucky that I remembered the way back to the bus that I was able to catch up with everyone again. Otherwise I have no doubt that they would have left without me. One person can be easily overlooked through a miscount, but two people, well that’s a bit harder. In either case, the tour guide after an attempted search did leave the old ladies behind and took the rest of us to the hotel.

Mainly because I felt sorry for the girl whose mother had been left behind (after having elderly relatives and the fear of them getting lost,) and partially because I almost got left behind the day before, I went back with the girl from my tour to look for the ladies. Thankfully we found our missing travelling companions quite quickly. Like children they had been distracted by the novelty of the Austrian equivalent of hot dog stand and so stopped following everyone else. Once they realised they had been left behind they wandered around the tiny square before getting tired going back to where they started which is where we found then. While this was thankfully a happy ending, it also brought home the reality of role reversals of the parent and the child and the time in life when we start having to worry about our parents as much as they worry about us. I wonder if society will ever get to the stage where they’ll use leashes for elderly people with Alzheimer’s like the leashes they have for children. If they do, I know the world will have gone mad.

Again, Austria is gorgeous with quaint little towns like Innsbruck and Salzburg. The next time I visit I'll have to stay more than 24 hours to fully appreciate this adorable country.