Luging in Austria

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Wow, what a great day. It began waking up to sunshine streaming in the windows after a rainy day yesterday. Just laying and relaxing under these huge down quilts on crisp line dried sheets was a little bit of heaven. Breakfast included in the hotel was a mouthwatering buffet of Austrian delights. My day was already made when there were 4 slices of walnut bread that tasted just like my Grandma used to make for me every Christmas. I ate 2 of them and my boys ate the other two.
We headed off to a luge run at one of the ski hills here in the area. It is a 4000 ft. concrete track that you ride a small sled down at typical break neck speeds. It was exhilarating to fly around the curves and zip down the straight stretches between. Unfortunately you would sometimes meet someone out for a Sunday stroll on their sled and you are all forced to slow down and smell the daisies. We had 4 tries to go down and all of us got a couple of fast runs without any interruptions. Vince got going a little too fast on the second time down and his sled flew off the track. The seat of his pants was not as aerodynamic and it forced him to a stop before his elbow wore down to the bone. Just a couple of nasty scrapes but he was gung ho to head up the hill again. There were also some rock climbing and bungee jumping opportunities for Kurtis and Troy. Kurtis worked until he has blisters on his hands to get up one of the rock climbing routes. Troy was afraid of heights 2/3 of the way up at first but soon he was scaling them as well. The trip down was quite fun too I think as they just let the rope ease them down to the ground once they were done. Kurtis tried the bungee trampoline jumping but found it more painful than it was worth the flying thrill.
We took a sidetrip to Garmisch Parmenkirchen (spelling is suspect) one of the World Cup downhill stops. It is a picruresque little town not far from Innsbruk. Vince was feeling more bruised and battered and not up for any more thrills so we returned to our hotel for a leisurely and relaxing evening.
As usual the food in the restaurant was amazing and the service has been incredible. Across the street this evening our host Gabbi told us that the Reutte Brass Band would be playing. Immediately on exiting the hotel we could hear the band. A quick stroll over revealed a Austrian costumed band playing strands which I am sure these mountains have been listening to for hundreds of years. Even the ruins of the castles didn't look as forboding tonight but seemed to sway along to the music.
We had a couple of other challenges today as we are unable to open any of our shawmail accounts (nonwindows operating system here). Amazingly every windows operating system in town was out of order. Hence why they don't use windows I guess. Therefore we can see that people have sent us email but we can't open them. (If you want to send us a message send it as a message to Belle on this website, I can access those) We also needed to access our email for a reservation time we booked for tomorrow. All was saved as the Windows system was working in Garmisch and we found an internet cafe that we could read our email at. Our reservation is intact for tomorrow. I'll let you know all about it.
Auf Weidersehn until tomorrow.

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Photos

Our hostess
This was our innkeeper in Reutte. Also the hiking guide and owner of this little cabin up on the mountain.

Hiking with the Austrians
This was the group we hiked up the mountain with at 10 pm.