I booked a trip to Seattle under the impression that it’d been two years since I had last visited, but when I looked back at old photos I was shocked to realize that it had only been a year since I had visited the Emerald City. Unable to change my flight date without incurring the airfare again in change fees, I decided to see if the weather of 2012 would cooperate with blue-sky pictures of my favorite mountain as much as it did just over twelve months ago.
You’d think that I would be able to go to a beach or some other place on the coast to get pictures of sunsets and sunrises. I did it in Detroit — before work, even — so I should be able to do it here, too. Unfortunately, for the first two months of my current rotation I arrived at work before the sun rose and left long after the sun had set, and even now — when sunset is well after 7 PM — I’ve been leaving at least twice a week after it’s dark out. Only on one solitary Saturday did I get anything close to a sunset, but with the colors fading to black within a matter of minutes I once again came to the conclusion that there really isn’t such a thing as a sunset in Charleston.
Before leaving for Germany, I had driven from Michigan back to my parents’ house on winter tires — I didn’t have a way to carry four more tires in my car at the time, and more important, I didn’t want to risk driving 1200 miles at the end of December on summer tires. But winter tires in Charleston? I put the quadruplets into bags and decided that I’d need to buy real bags for them “next” time.
After twenty-some weekends away from Stuttgart (out of 26), far more trips to Switzerland (six if I include the route I took to Chamonix) than I initially intended, and a last night in Germany spent not sleeping but rather packing and repacking my suitcases, I was sadly, exhaustedly, and at last headed back to the US for my final rotation.
I wrote that the ski weekend had sparked an idea to go back to the Alps for one final weekend. I knew in my mind exactly where I wanted to go — Zermatt — but every instinct said not to go. At 3:00 PM on Christmas Eve, however, I decided to drive for the last time toward the Swiss border.
This post embodies exactly what I didn’t want this blog post to become — in my idealized world, I’d take 200 pictures, have five worth showing, and put up the pictures to thunderous applause and Ooohs and Aaahs. Instead, I take 200 pictures, am rarely impressed by even a single one, and thus write long paragraphs in an attempt extoll the virtues of the place I visited rather than simply present one or two photos I took and let them speak for themselves. How convenient that a blog gives me the ability to justify its existence! :-)
The weekend of Dec. 16 was the ski weekend for which I had been waiting nearly six months — I’d only gone skiing twice, once in the 4000 m peaks of Wisconsin and another in the Himalaya-like summits of Michigan, so I wasn’t sure what to expect from skiing (rather than walking around) the Alps. What I found immediately is that the city of Kaltenbach is difficult to navigate without prior knowledge of its layout. My GPS wasn’t particularly smart — it recognized Kaltenbach 8, Kaltenbach 40 (both of which it placed at the same location), and Kaltenbach 16-something, but not Kaltenbach 23. Most of all, however, it didn’t help that every street in Kaltenbach is called Kaltenbach with no apparent logic to building numbering.
I fell a lot at first (no epic tumbles off cliffs, however), but the second day went much better. Even so, I didn’t trust myself to ski with a camera, so I have no pictures, crappy or otherwise, from atop Hochzillertal. Take my word for it, however: skiing in the Alps is really something. If only I had more than ten vacation days a year!
I came away with no Alps pictures and still lacking the sunrise picture that I’d been wanting since August 13, but what this weekend did accomplish was to spawn an idea for my final weekend. I mentioned before that I had fallen in love with Europe, but after multiple exploits to the Austrian, Bavarian, French, Italian (though indirectly), Lyngen (unrelated, but they’re still called “Alps” after all), and Swiss Alps, I think I finally realized — maybe it was the skiing this time that finally beat the sense into me — that I was just delaying the inevitable realization that perhaps I did like the Alps more than I denied in my first Zermatt post four months ago. In my experience from this skiing weekend, the magic of the Alps is strongest en plein hiver, so on the day before I was to fly back to the US, instead of packing or taking it easy in Stuttgart or even having a proper Christmas dinner, I instead headed southwest, southwest to the mountain that got me subconsciously enamored with mountains. What an expensive love affair that mountain has created.
I have less than two weeks left in Europe. It’s a scary thought: most of the money I’d normally put into savings has gone to the tourist revenue of France, Germany, Norway, Austria, the Czech Republic, Italy, and that big financial hole known as Switzerland. I haven’t been to a coast on mainland Europe yet, so refusing to lay low for my last two full weekends and wanting to “make the most” of my German Rail Pass by spending more money on yet another trip rather than suck up the sunk cost of the ticket, with a friend’s recommendation and letting it take the place of southern Italy or France I took a five hour train ride to warm and sunny Hamburg.
Four weeks out. My impending departure is beginning to weigh on me. It’s been an unreal — incredible — five months, but curiously, the one place I’ve hardly visited is Germany. After several flurries of interest, a trip to Berlin finally materialized over Thanksgiving weekend.
En me brossant les dents 
