So, man, where have we been. It's been a bit of a hectic little while as we have been heading back up towards Utrecht where we will be dropping off Lucy. After our last post we spent a few more days in Munich. Corina, a friend we met in Naples, lives near Munich and she came to see us for a day. We had WiesWurst and WeisBeer for breakfast (actually only I had beer but everybody had wieswurst). Weiswusrst is a traditional bavarian breakfast. We were instructed by our German friend Heiko that we weren't allowed to eat weiswurst after noon. We almost broke the rule because the service was really slow, despite us arriving there at 11. We did finish eating before noon, so its all good. We attempted to use the metro to reach the olympic park, but we couldnt quite figure out how the metro tickets worked so we had to come up with another plan - within walking distance. We walked to the Octoberfest grounds where in October there will be an insane amount of drunk people drinking beer in these humongous tents (holds 8000people per tent). It also happens to be the location of "the Bavaria" statue. We will attempt to post pictures of it in our next post...
After Munich, we decided to take the advice of our dear friend Rick Steves (aka Guide book guy) and went to visit Rothenburg, which is theoretically Germany's best kept Medieval old town. Rick Steves suggests doing all your shopping there, specifically in all the towns special Christmas shops. Needless to say that the superb looking Nutcrackers were above 100euros a piece, which makes these gifts beyond our reach... :) It was quite a pretty old town, though comparable to previous old city towns of Italy that we saw earlier in our trip.
The truly exciting part was leaving Rothenburg and driving to Heilbronn, quite ugly industrial town, but with great company. AnneMarie, a good friend from Waterloo has been doing a Coop there and we hung around with her for 2 evenings. She sadly had to work during the day, and even though her job is terrible and they treat her badly, we could not convince her to skip work, perhaps because she only actually had 3 days of work left before her coop term ended. It was fun to catch up on our various adventures of the summer as well as walk around the city park and downtown. We had yet more German beer, and yummy food. I specifically like "Kaspaztla", really not how it is spelt i am sure, and probably not how it is pronounced. It is a cross between spaghetti and gnochi, and is eaten with delicious melted cheese......
At this point it was Friday, and only having to be in Brussels on Sunday, we decided to return to Mayen, the very first climbing crag we visited in Europe. We thought we may enjoy it better than the first time, but turns out we didn't. We climbed a few of the same climbs and decided it was best to simply just move on.
We drove to Brussels on Saturday and met up with Dave, also one of the first people we met we when arrived in May. On Sunday (today) we decided to go to one of the "local crags" (about 45min away) and it was actually quite interesting and enjoyable climbing. Certainly a good way to conclude the climbing for our trip. Dave bravely led two difficult climbs (6a and 6a+ aka 5.10a and 5.10b) which David and I had alot of fun falling off of and hauling ourselves up. (Dave made it look like childsplay :) ) We did both make it to the top and were quite proud! We also in the process took about 100 pictures of the same climb - taking advantage of being a party of 3 climbers rather than our usual 2. We also did a few easier climbs in between...
I think that overall we didn't end up climbing quite as much as we originally had in mind before leaving Canada. I guess its easy to forget while planning about difficulties such as unpredictable weather, sickness, distances to travel... ;) But don't get me wrong, we are not at all disappointed. While we are not going home as suddenly super strong climbers, we have had a great climbing season, explored and sampled sooo many different areas, and learnt a lot about ourselves and our strengths in the process. We also enjoyed quite a bit of sightseeing, and that part of our story isnt quite over yet!! And of course we now have many places we can dream of returning to in the future... We have officially retired our ropes. We left one with a party of climbers in Mayen, and gave the other to Dave to use as a potential rope rug or knitted outfit (there is talk of a rope sweater)!!! They have been well used.
Tomorrow we must find a place to wash Lucy and give her a really good scrub before giving her up on Tuesday in Utrect. Unfortunately, we think a flock of birds had a party on a branch above Lucy after eating copious amounts of berries. We have a seriously huge mess to scrub off the roof... We also have to finish packing up our bags so we are ready to run off to Amsterdam for our last few days in Europe. We will be spending tomorrow evening in Vaught visiting some friends of Davids family. We are looking forward to meeting them!
We will have at least one more post before we conclude our trip. We are also sure to have interesting stories from Amsterdam... so don't give up yet!
PS. We have been entertaining you, hopefully, all summer. We are rather curious to see who has been keeping up, if you have a minute, post a comment to say hello :))) And to all those who have already commented on previous posts, thanks :)))
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Mmmm Bavarian Beer!!
So I can only imagine that by now you are all totally confused as to where we are, what we are doing and where we are going... I will therefore backtrack a bit to put you back on track.
Really the reason we have been changing our minds so much in the past few weeks is the weather. I think the rain chassed us all through Italy, as we wanted to climb in Val di Mello and it called for rain... so instead we drove to Arco, and got Ok weather. On the friday it had called for rain, so David and I decided we should try canyoning! (as per an earlier recommendation we had received...) My original idea of canyoning was repelling down into canyons and having to dangle 60-100m in the air before reaching the base of the canyon. Obviously, i was clueless. Canyoning is described by "jumping, sliding and repelling....", and involves wearing a full wetsuit and harness. Get the idea?? We were a group of about 14 plus 2 guides. Half girls half guys. All italian, and a hilarious group they were as well! Turns out that canyoning involves jumping from cliffs into the water below...from various heights. Of course the guides give you the option of rappelling, if you are too scared. Obviously, all the italian men didnt hesitate at the first jump - and i totally chickened out and rappelled. It was about a 7m drop - and all i could think of was that i wouldnt jump far enough and land on the rocks below :S Now I did manage to get my courage together and jump a the next opportunity, though it took me quite a bit of guts - as well as a terrible shriek to make the jump! It was a longer jump than the one i had just avoided. I do pride myself however in that of all the girls present, i was the only one that did any of the jumps woot woot. Now, to put the icing on the cake, the final jump was about 10 or 12m high! And both David and I did it! A few of the guys had opted out and repelled...And the last guy after us, we were told, said to the guy "I have to be brave like the canadian guy and just do it", which he did :)) Fun to try, though I dont think I have discovered a passion for canyoning...
After that, we had planned on meeting some of davids family in Verona - mostly for a quick stop to pick up some stuff we had left with them and jump in the shower. There was some confusion when we got to Verona however, and we only stayed with Davids family for a few hours. We had gone to Venice that same day - and walked around and got lost in the town for several hours. Venice really was beautiful, and we enjoyed it as long as we stayed away from the extremely crowded touristy streets! (And getting away from the swarms really wasnt all that difficult)
I have to admit i was really disappointed that the "gondeliers" didnt sing to their passengers :( Although of all the boats, we did see one which had two musicians singing and playing the accordeon, the sound filled the tiny "water streets" and we listened for a while as they floated away...
After Verona, we headed to the Dolomites. We couldnt possibly come to Europe and not climb in the oh so famous dolomites. We had planned to stay for a week, and had even picked 5-6 climbs that looked really exciting. I was slightly nervous, having heard the reputation of the dolomites... Loose rock, hard to protect, mostly pitons, difficult route finding... Yikes! Of course, the weather once again threatened to ruin our plans. For this, and also to get used to the area, we chose a "shorter climb" as our first pick. A 9 pitch, 250m ish route. I LOVED it! Ok, so you have to be a bit gutsy because protection is difficult, but no worries - the route difficulty was well within our reach and at no point did we fear we would fall...
(In red, the route that we climbed, in green, the long convoluted route we took to descend...)
Thankfully! The following day, because it was suppsoed to rain in the afternoon, we did an even shorter climb, of 150m. While still enjoyable (and David would say with more varied climbing), we got overtaken on the first pitch by a father and son, who stupidly slowed us down for the remaining 6 pitches. Not only were they climbing slower, but they decided to stretch out their pitches, making us wait at each anchor longer - and frustatingly wait while the father downclimbs because he has run out of rope. Gosh. That aside, it was fun, and the walk down was even more interesting. Turns out that there is a really easy descent from the mountain, and it used to be some sort of trench system dug into the mountain side probably from WWII. With tunnels, trenches, caches, rooms dug into the rocks... Pretty cool!! Seeing as we had our headlamps with us, we did a bit of exploring...
After the climb, we checked the weather only to realize that it called for rain for the following days, which cut our dolomite experience short - much to our displeasure... We were looking forward to the 500m climb Heiko had recommended, as well as a few others we had picked. Sigh.
Our spirits were brought up again however after we discovered Munich and the delicious Bavarian beer and food!
We spent most of today walking around the Englischer Gardens (apparently one of europes largest city parks) and enjoying ourselves at the BeerGardens! Yes, both David and I endulged in a 1litre beer (ok, so i cheated and had half lemonade - half beer, miam, much better in my opinion).
We had a chat with a German couple, talking about our travels and their trips to Canada. Its amazing the random people you can meet while travelling... We also found this english bookstore where we replenished our stock! Yes, no denying that we are reading tons of books this summer, having guilt free reading time has been awesome for the both of us. Especially now that we had this series we had started and really wished to know the end...
The plan for the next few days remain blurry. We may go climbing in Frankejura which is north east of Munich, but the weather may have more rain in store for us... if that is the case, we will see... We now have only 11 days left, and time is running out... We do eventually have to make our way up to Amsterdam prior to Aug.31st! And we have to be back in Utrect on the 28th to sell Lucy, as well as go back to Brussells...
Going back in the past, 2 pictures from switzerland... Though we did quite enjoy Bern, we were very sad to see they keep up the very old tradition of keeping bears captive in pits in the park... They looked rather miserable...
The dying lion of lucerne - in memory of the swiss mercenaries, carved right into the rock.
And some random pictures... Anyone willing to give information on the meaning of the picture below, we re interested about thoughts-ideas
The grapes are becoming juicier every day...
And after climbing our first climb in the dolomites we drove past this man... and decided to stop by for some cheese. Perhaps the tastiest Pecorino I have ever encountered... And ironically, we only wanted a little bit of cheese...and ended up with 13$ worth, HUGE chunks. Thats what the man thought "a bit" was (I suppose a lot of cheese would have meant buying the entire thing! And they were huge!)
Really the reason we have been changing our minds so much in the past few weeks is the weather. I think the rain chassed us all through Italy, as we wanted to climb in Val di Mello and it called for rain... so instead we drove to Arco, and got Ok weather. On the friday it had called for rain, so David and I decided we should try canyoning! (as per an earlier recommendation we had received...) My original idea of canyoning was repelling down into canyons and having to dangle 60-100m in the air before reaching the base of the canyon. Obviously, i was clueless. Canyoning is described by "jumping, sliding and repelling....", and involves wearing a full wetsuit and harness. Get the idea?? We were a group of about 14 plus 2 guides. Half girls half guys. All italian, and a hilarious group they were as well! Turns out that canyoning involves jumping from cliffs into the water below...from various heights. Of course the guides give you the option of rappelling, if you are too scared. Obviously, all the italian men didnt hesitate at the first jump - and i totally chickened out and rappelled. It was about a 7m drop - and all i could think of was that i wouldnt jump far enough and land on the rocks below :S Now I did manage to get my courage together and jump a the next opportunity, though it took me quite a bit of guts - as well as a terrible shriek to make the jump! It was a longer jump than the one i had just avoided. I do pride myself however in that of all the girls present, i was the only one that did any of the jumps woot woot. Now, to put the icing on the cake, the final jump was about 10 or 12m high! And both David and I did it! A few of the guys had opted out and repelled...And the last guy after us, we were told, said to the guy "I have to be brave like the canadian guy and just do it", which he did :)) Fun to try, though I dont think I have discovered a passion for canyoning...
After that, we had planned on meeting some of davids family in Verona - mostly for a quick stop to pick up some stuff we had left with them and jump in the shower. There was some confusion when we got to Verona however, and we only stayed with Davids family for a few hours. We had gone to Venice that same day - and walked around and got lost in the town for several hours. Venice really was beautiful, and we enjoyed it as long as we stayed away from the extremely crowded touristy streets! (And getting away from the swarms really wasnt all that difficult)
I have to admit i was really disappointed that the "gondeliers" didnt sing to their passengers :( Although of all the boats, we did see one which had two musicians singing and playing the accordeon, the sound filled the tiny "water streets" and we listened for a while as they floated away...
After Verona, we headed to the Dolomites. We couldnt possibly come to Europe and not climb in the oh so famous dolomites. We had planned to stay for a week, and had even picked 5-6 climbs that looked really exciting. I was slightly nervous, having heard the reputation of the dolomites... Loose rock, hard to protect, mostly pitons, difficult route finding... Yikes! Of course, the weather once again threatened to ruin our plans. For this, and also to get used to the area, we chose a "shorter climb" as our first pick. A 9 pitch, 250m ish route. I LOVED it! Ok, so you have to be a bit gutsy because protection is difficult, but no worries - the route difficulty was well within our reach and at no point did we fear we would fall...
(In red, the route that we climbed, in green, the long convoluted route we took to descend...)Thankfully! The following day, because it was suppsoed to rain in the afternoon, we did an even shorter climb, of 150m. While still enjoyable (and David would say with more varied climbing), we got overtaken on the first pitch by a father and son, who stupidly slowed us down for the remaining 6 pitches. Not only were they climbing slower, but they decided to stretch out their pitches, making us wait at each anchor longer - and frustatingly wait while the father downclimbs because he has run out of rope. Gosh. That aside, it was fun, and the walk down was even more interesting. Turns out that there is a really easy descent from the mountain, and it used to be some sort of trench system dug into the mountain side probably from WWII. With tunnels, trenches, caches, rooms dug into the rocks... Pretty cool!! Seeing as we had our headlamps with us, we did a bit of exploring...
After the climb, we checked the weather only to realize that it called for rain for the following days, which cut our dolomite experience short - much to our displeasure... We were looking forward to the 500m climb Heiko had recommended, as well as a few others we had picked. Sigh.Our spirits were brought up again however after we discovered Munich and the delicious Bavarian beer and food!
We spent most of today walking around the Englischer Gardens (apparently one of europes largest city parks) and enjoying ourselves at the BeerGardens! Yes, both David and I endulged in a 1litre beer (ok, so i cheated and had half lemonade - half beer, miam, much better in my opinion).
We had a chat with a German couple, talking about our travels and their trips to Canada. Its amazing the random people you can meet while travelling... We also found this english bookstore where we replenished our stock! Yes, no denying that we are reading tons of books this summer, having guilt free reading time has been awesome for the both of us. Especially now that we had this series we had started and really wished to know the end...
The plan for the next few days remain blurry. We may go climbing in Frankejura which is north east of Munich, but the weather may have more rain in store for us... if that is the case, we will see... We now have only 11 days left, and time is running out... We do eventually have to make our way up to Amsterdam prior to Aug.31st! And we have to be back in Utrect on the 28th to sell Lucy, as well as go back to Brussells...
Going back in the past, 2 pictures from switzerland... Though we did quite enjoy Bern, we were very sad to see they keep up the very old tradition of keeping bears captive in pits in the park... They looked rather miserable...
The dying lion of lucerne - in memory of the swiss mercenaries, carved right into the rock.
And some random pictures... Anyone willing to give information on the meaning of the picture below, we re interested about thoughts-ideas
The grapes are becoming juicier every day...
And after climbing our first climb in the dolomites we drove past this man... and decided to stop by for some cheese. Perhaps the tastiest Pecorino I have ever encountered... And ironically, we only wanted a little bit of cheese...and ended up with 13$ worth, HUGE chunks. Thats what the man thought "a bit" was (I suppose a lot of cheese would have meant buying the entire thing! And they were huge!)
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Hello Gentle Readers,
Today we are going to grace you with a picture post as we haven't really done a whole lot except for move from one rainy area to another... so without further delay:
One of our 66 or so shot of the matterhorn. David on the Summit of the Rifflehorn.
The Matterhorn as seen through Emilie's Eyes...
Emilie leading a corner on the route up the Rifflehorn.
The famous Troll eats babies statue in Bern...
Emilie leading one of the many slab pitches we climbed in Grimsel Valley.
Emilie following the Limestone route "New Entry" which we climbed on Saturday (rained off) and Sunday. 3 pitches 5c, 5c, 6a. I lost the red point because I screwed up a clip on the crux pitch and needed to hang to fix it. Nice route and unlike the other route wer bailed off of on Saturday was not polished at all. The route we bailed off of was a 16 pitch 5a but we could see our reflections on the rock.
Emilie being really naughty after we finished the climb New Entry... mmmm Grapes.
Today we are going to grace you with a picture post as we haven't really done a whole lot except for move from one rainy area to another... so without further delay:
One of our 66 or so shot of the matterhorn. David on the Summit of the Rifflehorn.
The Matterhorn as seen through Emilie's Eyes...
Emilie leading a corner on the route up the Rifflehorn.
The famous Troll eats babies statue in Bern...
Emilie leading one of the many slab pitches we climbed in Grimsel Valley.
Emilie following the Limestone route "New Entry" which we climbed on Saturday (rained off) and Sunday. 3 pitches 5c, 5c, 6a. I lost the red point because I screwed up a clip on the crux pitch and needed to hang to fix it. Nice route and unlike the other route wer bailed off of on Saturday was not polished at all. The route we bailed off of was a 16 pitch 5a but we could see our reflections on the rock.Emilie being really naughty after we finished the climb New Entry... mmmm Grapes.
An artistic picture of Venice. We visited Venice yesterday. Very nice city, lots of water, smells and tourists.
David sitting on a budget gondola. .50 Euro Cents for the authentic experience without the singing. The real thing would have cost about 100Euros. Ouch. Only one that we saw had any music and that seemed to be from a travelling band... one can only guess how expensive that would have been.
Hope you enjoyed the pictures! We gotta run as the internet is funky here and I have no more change. Tomorrow assuming the weather holds, we do our first climb in the dolomites. Weather is looking funky so the future is cloudy.
Saturday, August 4, 2007
Just a quick post - and more...
Hey everybody!
Just a quick post as I am at a Mac reseller and probably shouldn't be writing this here...
The day after our last post Emilie and I hiked 4 hours for a 200m climb. The panorama from the top was superb and we really enjoyed the climb. Very clean rock with a little bit of everything. Only problem with the climb is that it was sport bolted with approximatly 2 bolts per pitch... they were there when we needed them I suppose.
Oops, I got kicked off and have to start again... well not again but anyway from here I start.
The climb we had done was on a little mountain called the Reifflhorn. Theoretically it was supposed to be a crag used as training for the Matterhorn, I dunno about that though. Even after hiking all day, I still didn't get the impression that we were doing anything near to the difficulty of the Matterhorn. Regardless it was fun.
The following day Emilie and I left Zermatt, we intended to head back to Italy and try to climb Gran Paradiso. However, it seems that it was not to be as my eye had not yet become well enough to go onto a Glacier. So back to the hospital we went, where we found that the previous doctor was an idiot and I needed a stronger perscription. We didn't end up attempting Gran Paradiso. Insted we went back to Switzerland and did a bit of sight seeing. It really wasn't all that exciting actually. I think that we are getting a bit jaded as we have been sightseeing for 3 months and kinda want to stop seeing sights.
Bern was a nice town. A few nice sights. However, they had captive bears and it was pretty sad to see them in their concrete environment. We watched transformers in Bern and found out that the swiss need to have a 10 minute break in the middle of all their movies... it was quite odd.
After Bern we drove to Lucerne. Another nice town but not really much to do but walk around. We did the walk and it was nice. The next day we went to Zurich. Zurich was an interesting city. Very full of people. There was supposed to be an electricity in the air, but I didn't see it. Zurich ended up being very expensive as I was nabbed by the police travelling through a red light about 1 second too late. They have short Yellows in Switzerland.
The next day we went to Interlaken. Turns out that in order to have fun in Interlaken you need to spend a ton of money. We left shortly after arriving. And went to Grimsel Valley.
Grimsel Valley is a nice Glacier carved valley with a TON of granite slab. We spent a day sampling a slab route and decided that while it was fun, slab is not really our thing. We had intended to climb a couple of crack routes today but the weather moved in and isn't going to lift until Friday. So we moved on.
Right now we are in Lugano just north of Milan. We are heading back to Val del Mello (where we visited 2 months ago) to climb what is supposed to be the nicest climb in the alps. It's a 5.10a dihedral route and we have high hopes.
Stay tuned!
Just a quick post as I am at a Mac reseller and probably shouldn't be writing this here...
The day after our last post Emilie and I hiked 4 hours for a 200m climb. The panorama from the top was superb and we really enjoyed the climb. Very clean rock with a little bit of everything. Only problem with the climb is that it was sport bolted with approximatly 2 bolts per pitch... they were there when we needed them I suppose.
Oops, I got kicked off and have to start again... well not again but anyway from here I start.
The climb we had done was on a little mountain called the Reifflhorn. Theoretically it was supposed to be a crag used as training for the Matterhorn, I dunno about that though. Even after hiking all day, I still didn't get the impression that we were doing anything near to the difficulty of the Matterhorn. Regardless it was fun.
The following day Emilie and I left Zermatt, we intended to head back to Italy and try to climb Gran Paradiso. However, it seems that it was not to be as my eye had not yet become well enough to go onto a Glacier. So back to the hospital we went, where we found that the previous doctor was an idiot and I needed a stronger perscription. We didn't end up attempting Gran Paradiso. Insted we went back to Switzerland and did a bit of sight seeing. It really wasn't all that exciting actually. I think that we are getting a bit jaded as we have been sightseeing for 3 months and kinda want to stop seeing sights.
Bern was a nice town. A few nice sights. However, they had captive bears and it was pretty sad to see them in their concrete environment. We watched transformers in Bern and found out that the swiss need to have a 10 minute break in the middle of all their movies... it was quite odd.
After Bern we drove to Lucerne. Another nice town but not really much to do but walk around. We did the walk and it was nice. The next day we went to Zurich. Zurich was an interesting city. Very full of people. There was supposed to be an electricity in the air, but I didn't see it. Zurich ended up being very expensive as I was nabbed by the police travelling through a red light about 1 second too late. They have short Yellows in Switzerland.
The next day we went to Interlaken. Turns out that in order to have fun in Interlaken you need to spend a ton of money. We left shortly after arriving. And went to Grimsel Valley.
Grimsel Valley is a nice Glacier carved valley with a TON of granite slab. We spent a day sampling a slab route and decided that while it was fun, slab is not really our thing. We had intended to climb a couple of crack routes today but the weather moved in and isn't going to lift until Friday. So we moved on.
Right now we are in Lugano just north of Milan. We are heading back to Val del Mello (where we visited 2 months ago) to climb what is supposed to be the nicest climb in the alps. It's a 5.10a dihedral route and we have high hopes.
Stay tuned!
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