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Today Matt got to cross a pretty major item off of his "To Do" list...we walked across a country. Yep, a whole country. You're probably wondering which country...Liechtenstein.

For those of you not up on your European geography Liechtenstein is located between Switzerland and Austria and before you go getting too impressed it's only about 8 miles across. Liechtenstein is the 6th smallest country in the world and is about 62 square miles. It's also the only German-speaking country that doesn't border Germany. Before you run off and search Google for the smallest country in the world (you know you want to) it's the Vatican. You never would have thought of that one, would you? I know I didn't :)

It wasn't just Matt and I on this trek...we went with our friends Crystan, Paul, April, Clayton, and their dog Kody. Matt and Paul dropped off the rest of us in Switzerland in a town called Buchs while they drove over to Feldkirch, Austria to drop off Paul's car. Then Matt drove the two of them back and met up with us at a cafe where we were waiting for them. We started walking around 5 in the evening. The whole trek took about 2 1/2 hours and we kept a pretty good pace. We had a couple of bottles of water between us and April provided each of us with a Snickers bar. Matt was pretty convinced that our trip was going to get us onto that show "I Shouldn't Be Alive" but everything went off pretty much without a hitch.

Liechtenstein is a beautiful country. We passed several pens of sheep that had just been sheared, cute little German-style houses, well-kept little gardens, all with the Alps surrounding us as we walked. This was a holiday weekend in Europe (May 1st is a pretty big holiday here) so just about all of the shops that we passed were closed and we didn't see too many people either. Kody got REALLY excited when she saw the sheep and ran up the fenceline for one of the enclosures. None of us knew that the fence was electric until Kody hit it and immediately ran away...right into the road and into the path of an oncoming car. Whoever the driver was, we are all extremely grateful for their quick reflexes. The driver was able to swerve to avoid hitting Kody and Clayton pulled her back onto the sidewalk.

It didn't occur to most of us to bring our passports and , wouldn't you know it, there's actually border control between Austria and Liechtenstein. That's actually pretty unusual...most EU countries have open borders and it's usually like crossing borders between States but here you had to stop your car and show your passport to a guard. They didn't give us any problems when we walked across the border from Liechtenstein to Austria so, after we got to Paul's car we just turned around and walked back into Liechtenstein while Paul (one of the only ones with a passport) drove across the border and picked us up. Sounds kind of shady, huh? lol

As I mentioned before, just about everything was closed so the first few restaurants we found that were actually open were packed. We finally found a little Italian restaurant that had a limited menu and enough seats for all of us. We had pizza and lasagne and it was fantastic :) After dinner we all went our separate ways. April, Clayton, Paul, and Crystan drove the short distance to Garmisch, Germany to stay overnight and Matt and I made the 3 1/2 hour drive home.

So we walked across a country. Not bad for one day, huh?

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