Even though it was only a couple of days we fell into our routine. We slept in, made huge breakfasts, went to the gym, ran small errands, drove around Vicenza, watched movies, drank wine, and did nothing. It was exactly what we needed- time to be with each other once again, catch up on the previous month, and spend precious quality time together.
I had booked our "big" block leave trip for the 2nd week, knowing full and well that James wanted to just "chill", but to my surprise he came back from the MRE ready to travel!! On his way back from Germany the boys drove through Austria and into Italy. James said he woke up from a nap some of the most breathtaking views of mountains he had ever seen and that he really wanted to take me. He had driven through Brenner's Pass. This pass is the lowest crossing point through the Alpine Mountains and it in this area is is one of the only passes. As you drive along the highway you can look down and see pastures filled with farms, vineyards, and pastures and then you look up and all you can see is mountain. Huge mountains that tower over the road on both sides. It truly was a majestic sight to see! James and I ended up taking a detour...of course and drove through the Italian portion of the Alps- another sight to behold. It took us 3hours to go about 75km....the "roads" snaked up the mountains and went through several towns tucked away from what seemed to be the rest of the world. We stopped at several places along the way, took pictures, walked around, looked down into some deep valleys, and James tried to throw me over the rail a couple of times. Typical.
Once we drove through Brenner's pass we drove about 45min more and got to Innsbruck, Austria. Innsbruck was an awesome place! First of all it was really, really clean. We kept noticing how nice all of the streets looked- even around the train tracks...which I feel like are usually covered in graffiti.
We ate dinner at this really fancy restaurant...much fancier than we had originally anticipated...called 360 Bar. Bar...thus the confusion about how nice of place it was...oh well. This "bar" was located in the historic part of downtown at the top of a VERY tall building. It took us about 20minutes of walking around to find it. But we got a beautiful 360 view of the town and the mountains that surrounded and the whole city glowed as the sunset. We did forget to take pictures because we were slightly uncomfortable. Whoops.
On our way home we found this cute little bar, "Down Under" and decided to stop in and have a beer. We have just started feeling more comfortable traveling, so we never just drop into bars late at night...but we are SO glad that we did. We chatted it up with the bar tender, asked her about what Austrians drink- which apparently is Jager...without the blood in it and we met a friend! His name is Frank. And he told us that we "sort of" spoke English. **Side note- which actually makes a LOT of sense, the whole time we were in Austria, people were snickering at us and we COULD NOT figure out why...its because we have American accents.** We spent the rest of the night talking with him and his friends about his military experience, learning that he is now in the oil business working for some company that I can't remember and he thought it was awesome that James came from an oil family. We then continued down the very normal conversation of gun control laws in America. Why did we do this? No idea. But it was fun. And we debunked their myth that all Americans walk around with a gun in their back pocket shooting people.
We were SUPPOSE to get up the next morning- explore downtown, go to the Swarvoski Crystal museum and then head home. Instead, we were forced to stay another night because neither one of us were functioning until about 3:00 in the afternoon. Awesome. So, we slept the morning away, drank lots of water, and spent the afternoon walking around. All I wanted to see were the colorful houses along the Inn River...not sure why that was so important, but it was, and it turned out that I got some pretty awesome pictures. We walked around downtown, ate strudel, drank cappacino's, tried on Sound of Music hats, and tried to go into the Emperor's Palace- but we got there too late- only 45min till close and the lady said we needed and hour. Whatever. We did stumble into some beautiful churches- very elaborate and grandiose decor inside. The beautiful moment was short lived as we were slowly outrun by a massive Asian tourist group taking lots of pictures.
The last part of our spontaneous adventures was Swarovski's Crystal World!! I had no idea what to expect, but this was the Swarovski Crystal factory- so it was calling my name. You enter through this massive head...which you find out is basically the B.F.G- Big Friendly Giant. You walk through a maze of displays by several different artists that used crystals in their artwork. It was 10x better than we had initially expected- which was the history of Daniel Swarovski and his glass cutting factory.
The best part of the trip....James got me a present!!!!!
...Just realized you can't see inside my box...sparkly earrings!!
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