Hermagor to Liesing

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I am emailing from the laptop in the dining room of the B and B - Haus Anita in Liesing. Here are the daily stats as calculated by Fred.....we went 57.5 km (in the Alps every fraction of KM counts). We climbed 897 metres....that was very hard. That's adding every incline we did together. The highest we got was 1163 metres. We started in Hermagor at 797 M and are now at 1117 in Liesing. Fred has no problems....I am having a few. My butt is sore and although aerobically I'm OK - this is a lot of hard pumping with an extra 20KG of luggage. Spirits are high though so no worries. Frank would hate it...Henry would love it and i do wish he was along for this ride.

I will update the days preceeding but only after Fred downlaods my text - I don't feel like typing it all again.

So we left Hermagor and followed the Grail valley again with some reasonable climbs. Lunch in Mauthen-Kunchaus just a lovely little sleepy town, beautifully manicured like everything is in Austria. Even old buildings dating back to 1600 look brand new.....I kid you not. Then the serious climbing began but the positive side of all this torture was the magnificent views. We had a picture perfect day of sunshine so all the Alps and their snowy tops were visible. The meadows are so green, contrasted against the deeper green of the conifers. The forests smell of cedar and other evergreens. Every once in a while there is a small scale lumber mill and the newly sawn lumber is just a wonderful smell. Lots of forestry going on in these mountains. The lumber trucks wind their way on these treacherous roads with huge logs. Fred said the Swedish companies are in here doing all this.....what's with that......I thought they had their own IKEA forests. If you could see that between us and the canyons below, there are sometimes no barriers. There is more attention paid to barriers on the uphill side of these narrow roads to protect from landslides, falling rocks and in winter, snow.

The air is unbelievably fresh. Wisteria and lilacs are in bloom everywhere. The fields are full of flowers...some I recognize others are new.

Every hamlet and village has a church - either an onion spire or the more traditional kind. They can be big or teeny tiny. Bells ring constantly. I stopped at one that had 6 x 2 person pews on either side and an elaborately gilded little alter. The preists must be itinerant and go from hamlet to hamlet. This is definitely Heidi country. These folks are very traditional, development and modern are bad words here and life moves very slowly.

I am pooped and am heading for my bed very soon. It's much more than a straw mattress though...very comfortable, impeccably clean room and only 25 E each with breakfast.

Pardon the typos _ the keyboard is somewhat different from ours in Canada.

Cheers for now,

Grace

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