Arturo, Mark and I got out of the apartment at 6:50am, walking to the nearest supermarket. When you visit Europe, you're used to very indifferent customer service. Some service workers even seem to think that customers are a nuisance. This store, despite being part of a chain, was tiny and had the most enthusiastic customer service agent in Europe I'd ever met. We started by buying bread and eggs, and then I spotted Weiss wurst. We bought two packets of 6, reasoning that would be two each. The customer service agent immediately reached back behind her and grabbed the special mustard that goes with Weisswurst proactively!
We then visited the other grocery store for more pedestrian needs. We also bought more sunscreen, having ran out. The kids would forever complain about the icky sunscreen, since they were much more used than our brush on sunblock which we'd successfully used for years.
The kids hadn't had Weisswurst at all on this trip before, and so they chowed down like crazy. Boen ate 3, as did Bowen. "Boen has got to be half weisswurst by now!" remarked Mark. We then got water bottles filled and got ready to visit the cable car for the Mayrhofen Panaromic walk, which Arturo had identified and confirmed with Stephan was a good one. Stephan had spent time in Mayrhofen before, so he decided to take the day off and work remotely instead. I asked him to ponder on whether he wanted to do the Stelvio or Silvretta instead. Boen got Otto to start pushing for Silvretta, since he thought that Silvretta + Klausen was much prettier than the Stelvio. Xiaoqin speculated that Stelvio would end up being their preference because it was just much more famous than Silvretta.
We walked over to the Penkenbahn cable car station and bought tickets (I bought the wrong ticket which cost a bit more) and then took the cable car up. It is a measure of the spectacular nature of the places we were going that our initial impressions were of being underwhelmed. The place was pretty, no doubt about it. It just didn't stand up to Secada or Tre Cime. I was glad we chose to stay for only 2 nights instead of doing more hiking in the area --- the location wasn't high enough anyway to stay cool, though the apartment we stayed at was cool enough even without AC.
The hike did grant us views all the way into the Italian Border, on the other side of the St Jakob/San Giacomo pass laid Sterzing, the town where we had started so many days ago. We walked past several artificial lakes and visited a mountain top church before doubling back and hiking down to the lower cable car station and riding it back to town, where we bought quick snack lunches at the supermarket before going back to the apartment to relax, get hydrated, do laundry, change into swimming trunks and then walk to the swimming pool.
The Mayrhofen swimming pool offered special rates after 3:30pm, so we bought passes and then proceeded to talk our way into the indoor area where the water slides were. There were two water slides which were on a timed schedule. One would open, then there'd be a 10 minute pause, then there would be another that would open. It was because there was insufficient staff to keep both slides open at the same time.
One of them, dubbed crazy river was the oddest water slide I'd ever seen. It had a couple of intermediate stops almost designed to stop you so you have to stand up and get onto the next stage of the slide. This looked like it was guaranteed to cause one slide user to crash into another if the previous one was slow. This was probably of no consequence if you were a kid and light, but I didn't want to be the adult responsible for slamming into a kid at high speed in a water slide like this one so after trying it once I stopped using it.
The other slide was much better designed, a fully enclosed tube that sloshed you around from side to side at high speed. If you weren't careful water would get up your nose. We all enjoyed that one thoroughly and couldn't get enough.
Arturo noticed that the supermarket closed at 6:00pm, so we had to leave earlier than expected to buy dinner and breakfast. We bought Weisswurst, for breakfast, and prepared to make Spaghetti Bolognese for dinner. We also got word that Otto Senior was excited about driving the Stelvio on the RV, so we started looking at train schedules and forecasts.
The forecast for the next day was for pleasant morning and a thunderstorm in the afternoon. We could take the train to Jenbach and then to Landeck where the climb to Reschen pass started, but that would forfeit riding in good weather. I decided to split the difference and proposed riding to Jenbach first thing in the morning, and then taking the train to Landeck and then riding up towards Reschenpass as high as possible. My preferred goal was to make Nauders, but Pfunds was also plausible. Nobody disagreed, but Stephan had a complication which was that Otto Jr really wanted to ride the train while he and his dad would do the drive to Landeck. He would have to meet us at the train station on our unpredictable schedule and then entrust his 7-year-old to the bad influence of our 13 and 10 year olds.
While dinner was being made, I checked the flat tire on the front.
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