Home from Innsbruck

Home again. Much as I love to travel, it's always nice to be home. I may be doing an occasional random Innsbruck post or two in the future to try to post more pictures of the MANY I took while I was over there. This picture was taken from the Imperial Garden, the Hofgarten, which was basically outside the back door of my hotel. Because it was so close, I got a chance to wander in it several times. The garden was huge, well-kept and gorgeous and contained an immense variety of trees and shrubbery, probably from all over. This massive tree was completely in bloom, and like most of the varieties in the garden, I have no idea what it was. It was beautiful.

I have so many pictures from this trip that it's difficult to decide which ones to include in this blog. I have more pictures from the church, but given that I've already posted some from there, I should post other pictures. I have quite a few from this garden also, as well as quite a few that I took when we went up the mountain. None of the pictures really do justice to the scenery, but maybe they give an idea of how beautiful it all was.

One afternoon two of my colleagues and I took off for some sightseeing. We rode the cable cars up to the top of one of the mountains which surround Innsbruck. From there you have a pretty spectacular view of the Alps, as well as a great view down at Innsbruck. The day we went it had rained in the morning, and there were still quite a few clouds between us and Innsbruck. You could get occasional peeks down, and it was cool to see the cable for the cable cars disappear into the clouds and then to travel through them. This picture to the left shows that. The clouds would hide us and then pass by, or we would climb out of them. The trip began at the Congress Center and a tram takes you through four stations to where the cable car starts. The tram rail rises very steeply and so the cars are set up to pretty much stay level. Unlike a train, the tram cars are apparently hooked to the track so that on the steep sections if you're in the first car, you're looking out over the top of the cars behind you since they're lower on the track. At Hungerburg you get off the tram and walk to the cable car station. There are restaurants and houses there ( a small town?) and on the way down we stopped for strudel and drinks. Going up, we just wanted to get to the top.

There are two cable cars to go to the top. The first one is large and takes you from Hungerburg to Seegrube. There are two cars for this section, one going up while the other one comes down. The next section runs between Seegrube and Hafelekar and has only one cable car running up and back. At the top there is a short hike up to the summit where there is a cross with the words, "Bergsohne Innsbruck 2007" on it . This picture gives you an idea of the hike up to the summit although the picture is probably too small to let you see cross. One of my friends and I hiked up to the summit, took pictures at the cross and looking down to try to get a good shot of Innsbruck through the clouds. We never did get a great view of Innsbruck from the top because the clouds kept passing by. We had good views of it from the cable cars once we got below the clouds, but couldn't get good pictures from the cable cars. This shot is through/around the clouds from the top.