Hello, friends. I hope you enjoyed the guest blog earlier this week. I also secretly hope you missed me. Either way, do not fret – I am back. This past weekend we went on a little adventure with our American friends, ahem, our only friends, in Munich…Julie and Noah. We ventured to a little Bavarian town called Wallberg about an hour and a half from Munich for some sled riding. Sorry, is that sled riding you said? Why yes, yes it is. We of course took the train to this little town (29 Euros for up to 5 people roundtrip – what a deal!) and then had to hop on a bus for another 20 minute ride up the mountain. This is the Alps, people. The Bavarian Alps. Sounds pretty cool, right? I went skiing sled riding in the Swiss Alps! Bucket List – check.
When arriving in this town, it was pretty much exactly what you would expect a little Bavarian town to be: old-school looking houses and shops, small town stores and cafés and even little shops selling dirndls and lederhosen! We wanted to stop and try to stock up for Oktoberfest, but we were running a bit late to our train out of there, as you will see. If you have been keeping track of the weather here in Munich, which I’m sure you haven’t, you might be confused of how we could go to the mountains and expect snow when it was 50 degrees F all last week in Munich. If you had that question in mind, it would be completely legitimate. It was, in fact, warm in Munich last week, but Julie checked the live webcam at Wallberg, and promised there was some snow on the ground so figured we’d be okay. If you’re anything like me – ahem, if you grew up in Ohio – you’re thinking…what? You went 1.5 hours away to SLED ride? You’re thinking we took these sleds down a little baby hill (or even decent sized hill, Rapid Run style) that took approximate 13 seconds. Wrong. I will explain. So, we get to the mountain top rental place and rented sleds for 5 Euros each. These are the old school wooden sleds too, not those plastic ones you buy at Wal-Mart or a simple makeshift garbage can lid. We then unpacked our backpacks, threw on our extra layers of gloves and hats as well as huge & awkward snow pants (or big, overall bib-type pants in my case) and proceeded to the ski lifts. It was a long, beautiful ride up as we could see the half-snowy mountain that we were ascending and a huge lake in the background surrounded by trees and other mountains.
As we were making our way up, we saw some crazy people jumping off the top of the mountain. I mean literally jumping. Of course they had nice little hang glider-parachute things on their backs, but it was crazy! Apparently you can just bring your own and glide around like it’s nobody’s business…kind of like, I think I’ll go for a walk today…or mayybeee…yea, lets grab the parachute and jump of the mountain. It was cool to see, but there were quite a few of them and there were many times that it looked as if they were about to crash into each other. After the 15 minute or so ride to the top, there was a Panorama restaurant that we visited later on and there were people everywhere. It was funny to see half the people in legit snow gear and some people in legit snow gear: shorts/short sleeve version. I saw one skier with ski goggles, a winter hat, big snow boots, a big coat and colorful, swim-trunk-like ski shorts. I like your style. We explored around the top of the mountain a bit…made our friends pose for an O-H-I-O (tough for two U. Texas grads, hence the hook’em hands hidden in our OHIO, unbeknownst to us at the time) and then prepared ourselves with what was to come.
We tried to scope out those going before us to see what we needed to do, what we needed to concentrate on. My big worry was how the heck I was going to turn this thing, and everyone seemed to be going so fast! The snow was a bit slushy, so not ideal conditions, but frankly I would have preferred the warm temperatures and slushy snow to freezing temperatures and icy snow. So I sat down on my wooden sled and started off. Eddie was in front of me and I saw him go speeding down the first part, followed immediately by a tumbling crash into the snow. This is when I first learned to steer. I continued to speed down the hill, seeing a figure behind me rolling in the snow with a sled and a backpack. If I knew how to stop, maybe I would have tried. Anyway, this is a mountain. I mean, literally, I am sledding down a mountain. It had varying degrees of steepness, narrowness and slushiness, adding to the uncertainty of speed, direction and how many times I would wipe out. It was so much fun, speeding down this mountain on a big, wooden sled.
The tough parts came when there were bumps in the road. Like literally mini-mounds of snow randomly throughout the course. These things were crazy. I mean, no joke, I was flying through the air at some points, only to land again on that hard, wooden sled. There were a couple of times when my sled got stuck in the snow or on a bump or something and my body kept flying. At least those landings were somewhat softer. The worst was totally wiping out on a huge hill and almost unable to climb/crawl/creep back up to retrieve my sled. All in all, it took just under an hour to get to the bottom, and when we got there our feet were soaking wet due to insufficient snow-blocking shoes and our butts were extremely sore. Nonetheless, we paid for two rounds so by golly, two rounds is what we were going to do.
We dragged ourselves back up to the ski lift and decided to eat at the restaurant at the top of the mountain and thaw out a little bit before we went back down. At the top of the mountain, people were sitting around in what looked like beach chairs, just staring out into the abyss that is the Bavarian Alps. It was kind of a backwards picture to have…getting a suntan at the top of this snowy mountain, but it looked very serene and relaxing. One of my favorite parts was seeing all of the doggies up there gallivanting through the snow. We saw one lab chasing after homemade snow balls made by his owner. He would run to find them and then start nibbling away…too cute.
So the second time down was a bit better, we knew the lay of the land a little more and knew what to expect for sure. This time we were flying down the hill, even through these big “end of the race” banners above us that said, “SLOW” in 5 different languages. Unbeknownst to us speeding down the mountain, the timeline for A) Last chance to return sled B) Last bus before it starts coming only every 2 hours C) Train ride back to Munich was nearing. I don’t think any of us was really paying attention to the time. We got our sleds returned literally 10 minutes before it was “last call”, and made the bus 15 minutes before it arrived. We were waiting for that 15 minutes in the little makeshift bus stop, peeling off our drenched socks and stripping down to the layer under our big, bulky snow pants and jackets. We hopped on the bus and then caught the train back to Munich. After 4 months of German natives asking … “have you been skiing yet? Did you go to the Alps yet?” we were finally able to say, “YES”. We could just leave out the part that it was almost 50 degrees….and we went sledding.
Or is it Hook Ems with a hidden Ohio?
Nice blog and great times sledding!
What a great memory and adventure!
sounds much better than some soccer,oops futball match!