Hiking the Austrian Alps

A four-day hike up and around Schneeberg, the easternmost 2000-plus meter mountain in the Alps.

Schneeberg is the closest 2000-meter mountain to Vienna. In the middle of a trip to Vienna, and then Paris, I traveled there by train, that is, to the town of Payerbach and then beyond.

This diary is broken up into day 1, day 2, day 3, and day 4.

Photos and text follow…

On a turboprop in Cleveland taking off for Toronto, from there Warsaw (briefly) and then (Vienna. I'm sitting in row 2a, which has plenty of leg room. The catch, though, is that the propeller is twirling in a (geometric) plane not ten feet from my seat! Ah the modern, or in this case perhaps not quite so modern world. 6:05 PM and we're on our way (and time, I believe, to insert ear plugs… wow, that makes a surprising difference).

6:26, May 16. Given that we are no longer over water, I'm going to take a guess that we're now over Canada. :-)

Staring into the whirling propeller reminds me of the insanity of Cedar Point. In fact, even donning my backpack reminded me of the shoulder harnesses at Cedar Point. I miss riding the Gatekeeper. :-) OK, a bit of bouncing around as we circle around the airport, and descend, or was that a different airport? So confusing. I'm guessing yes, different, as we descend and deploy landing gear. I keep imagining we're about to do a wing over (hello, Gatekeeper). With luck we won't. ;-)

On the ground in Toronto. Does my cell phone work up here? It seriously doesn't look so. Oh, or maybe so! (Though I'm roaming…)

8:03 PM, May 25, Toronto, waiting to fly to Warsaw. I'm bored… I'm also resisting anti-boredom food consumption. I guess it doesn't help that I'm trying to get work done. My new motto—do it on the phone! Or, rather, reading PDFs on my cell phone taps into one of my more impressive superpowers, my nearsightedness… Yup, I'm bored… perhaps I'll take a photo!

10:17 PM, I'm on the plane, a dreamliner! :-) Specifically, I'm sitting in a window seat that is over a massive, deliciously curved, impressively smooth wing. I seem to have a little bit of leg room (yay for me) though we'll see how that goes once (if? Please don't!) the person in front of me decides to recline his seatback… OK Atlantic ocean, here we go!

4:45 AM, May 26. OK, in reality it's 10:45, or at least it's going to be… I think that means that we're in the air for another hour and a half or so. Of course, then I'll just be hanging out in another airport until I catch my flight to (Vienna, but whatever.

Dinner on the plane was some sort of chicken. It wasn't rubbery! Now how do you suppose they managed that? Breakfast was some sort of beef and cheese sandwich, plus yogurt. Not the most exciting food in the world, but not awful either. I have a theory that most airline food is at best a poor approximation of the food people normally eat, so is viewed as less than desirable. But I so rarely eat "normal" food, so this is a treat, and besides, so much better than cafeteria food (or at least this was).

In between I think I got some sleep. I even dreamed at some point. My plan of trying to sleep on some approximation of a European cycle may have helped. I didn't fall to sleep nearly as early as I have been, but am awake at about the same time. Now if only I could stand up and move around!

2:48 PM, May 26, Warsaw, etc. time. Well, we arrived in Warsaw and deplaned and now have replaned, this time one heading for (Vienna (and, mercifully, for now, that's it). I'm over the wing again, in a window seat, but a much smaller wing! (Fokker 70 is the plane type.)

Started back to work on my talk. When it first loaded there were no images. Panic! But I reloaded and all was good. Now I look forward to arriving in (Vienna and being ruinited with my luggage…

2:00 AM, May 27. Yup, that's 8:00 PM home time and apparently I'm now awake, at least for a while. I guess it's as good a time as any to put more time into my talk. (IST, Austria, outside of (Vienna…

11:22 PM, May 27, (IST , outside of (Vienna, outside of (Vienna. Survived my first talk of the trip. Managed to time it out just about right. Everybody seemed most impressed about the part which I presented as something along the lines of, this something that I totally made up. Oh well, it really wasn't a bad hypothesis, though totally made up!

8:45 AM, May 28. Finally pulled myself away from IST , and am now on a bus to (Vienna, with goal of reaching the train station. Time to see what sort of capabilities mapy.cz has… Answer, there is GPS while in airplane mode. That is a good start. :-)

Trying to keep track of where this bus is going via GPS and mapy.cz. Happy as it makes a turn that I think brings me into (Wien.

9:26, May 28, Erin Heiligenstadt. So here is where the bus clearly reached the end of the line. I was able to show the ticket person what I had written down as where I want to go (Reichenau an der Rax). She replied with something that started with a P(?!?). I decided not to argue, and so now I have tickets to (Pauetbach-(Reichenau-Bahnhof. We'll follow the route on mapy.cz to make sure it's what we're supposed to be doing. First leg starts at 9:51, which I assume takes me to the main station (Wien Handelskai). Time to start figuring out some German. (Oh, and btw, 18.11 Euros for the tickets.)

11:17, Except it wasn't, though I didn't yet know this. I got on and we immediately started going in what I figured was the wrong direction. And then after a strop or two we ended up in a place that was clearly not a stop. Turns out it was the end of the line. But what to do? I waited and then we started moving, this time in the right direction.

But I wasn't convinced that this was a regional line. And sure enough, after many stops we were on the other side of (Wien, again at the end of the line!!!

So I figured that I was going to have to figure out where to get off of this thing. I couldn't search mapy.cz while not online, so I looked for tallish mountains on the map on my phone, found the ones I thought I was headed towards, IDed the town I was supposed to be going to, followed the tracks on the map back to (Wien, looked for a place with lots of tracks (figuring that would be a main station), figured out its name, found it on the map in the train I was really riding, and then almost immediately the train stopped at that station. I mean, we're talking 30 seconds later.

I grabbed my pack, got off, looked for a place that might have information, was almost immediately waited upon, and before I even asked my question I saw on the display what train I now needed to get on, when, and where. This was quickly corroborated, and the new (next) train arrives in 7 minutes. This is training for next Wednesday when I need to make it back to (Wien, and then to the airport to catch my plane to Paris!!!

11:37, OK, this time I'm on the right train. What makes all of this bearable is that the train does all of the work. We arrive at 1:08 so I'm going to set my alarm for 1:00…

1:18, Made it to Pauetbach-(Reichenau. We're definitely in hilly countryside, and green, too. Mercifully, it's not nearly as sunny and warm as in (Wien. Now to get my bearings (shouldn't be hard as across the tracks is north), and the then start hiking (I already filled up water-wise). (Yay, and the GPS figured out where I am again :->)

4:11, May 28, I've climbed 650 meters. :-) The trail has been pretty beautiful, climbing for a while through rocks and cliffs. It's been very humid, almost but not quite cool out, overcast, and now with thunder in the distance. I'm about a kilometer horizontal and 100 vertical meters from where I'm guessing I'll spend the night. The lack of linear progression is quite liberating. There are so many trails and mountains to choose from, and all the shelter one could want, as well as trains, busses, and hitchhiking to get back… but is that rain I hear!?!

5:05 PM, So "it" is a mountain hut. In my experience, this would be something that you would be lucky if it had as wooden floor (i.e., versus dirt), much less enough walls that a door is needed. Instead, this is very fancy. They were surprised (and happy) that I was carrying a sleeping bag. So I'm in dorm room 12. I could order a nice meal as well, though I think I'll both contribute to relieving the mass burden in my backpack and avoid milk products by pigging out on what I am carrying. Still, to not have to sleep in the rain in a teeny weeny tent. What a concept!

Hiking the Austrian Alps (day 1)