The last climbing in Europe

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 :)))