"But, oh, what providence
What divine intelligence
That you should survive
As well as me"

-Decemberists



Select photos are up from the last week or so, spent in Salzburg, Admont, and the Alps.





Really love this one, wanted to make sure no one missed it...


Anna's family has a bottle of GDR wine, from 1989. Excellent year...


Sitting on the edge of a cliff, about 1500 meters (4500 feet) above the valley below...


There was a lot of climbing up the second mountain, a lot of situations where, if you slip, you're in trouble. Climbing down, however, was worse. I was introduced harshly to a system of ropes as you descend, always with a rocky chasm of death (about 500 meters, 1500 feet) beneath you. The ropes are permanently attached to the rocks, but some of them were quite old and creaky...


Note the second level of green in this one, behind the edge of the second ladder/staircase. If you fell on those first few ladders and ropes, you would fall all the way to that level, after hitting a few rocks on the way down...


This was the rock we came most of the way from a valley at 1400 meters to a waterfall at about 700 meters to. From the picture, it looks like there could have been a lot less vertical paths to take...I wonder why we didn't.



Anyway, great fun. Was very freaked out at my first introduction to holding onto a rope as you go down. I can now say that, at least in Lord of the Rings, with the stairs of Cirith Ungul, there were actual STAIRS the whole way up, and not rocky footholds. I didn't get many photos of the difficult parts because I put my camera in my backpack, in a bunch of clothes, in case I fell, and it broke (Anna commented that I'd've had a lot worse things to worry about if I fell). Also, at the difficult parts, taking photos would have been pretty damn impossible...you really needed two hands.

I'm coming back home tomorrow...dammit. Want to stay here for another three months. In fact...I might.