May 5

Hello computer! Hello laptop! Hello internet! I’ve been away. I haven’t touched my own laptop with an American keyboard in 4 days or so. I’m not complaining. Because these past 4 days have been filled with wonder and excitement. Adventure and thrills. Views from the top and clean mountain air.

I’m writing this post on May 4, 2009. I’m currently in Ferrara, Italy with an old friend from Raquette Lake. She’s from Wales but she’s studying here for a year.

I left Amsterdam on Wednesday morning nice and early. It was about 13 hours of travel from Amsterdam to Innsbruck, Austria. I don’t mind long train rides at all. I looked out the window about the entire time. Holland is beautiful. Germany is lush. Switzerland is stunning. Austria is unbelievable. Northern Italy is simply unreal.

When I got to Austria my friend Niklas picked me up in his VW T3 camping van, which is pretty freaking cool. It’s white with all kinds of black and white stickers on it with black and white checkered hubcaps (which he pained himself) and we applied a strip of black and white checkered tape around the whole van as a border.

We first went to his mother’s house for a glass of wine and to see literally the best view of Innsbruck in the whole city (photos coming soon). He lives half way up a mountain and seriously it takes a very skilled driver to maneuver (or manoeuvre if you’re English) a giant van up the side of a mountain.

Unfortunately I’m going to make a long story short and just rave about the mountains. Holy cow. The mountains are unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. Niklas assured me that Lake Garda would be “nothing like Lake Michigan.” It was nothing like Raquette Lake either. While Raquette Lake was in the mountains, the smooth rolling mountains are nothing like the Imposing Monstrous snow-capped beasts framing Lake Garda. I was in shock. Driving through the towns there were grape vines Everywhere.

I also had a plastic bag full of all my wet clothes with us. I’d done laundry at Niklas’ house the night before we left for Garda and we found out (during my attempts to do laundry) that the dryer was broken. So the first thing we had to do when we got to the campsite was to string up a clothesline for tee shirts and underwear. I hung socks in the trees. Jeans over the van doors. We quickly made the place “home.”

There was also a free ride biking race that weekend that two of Niklas’ friends were competing in. This is some seriously intense mountain biking. The bikes are equipped with triple hydraulics and all kinds of important fancy things to make mountain biking easier. Niklas couldn’t compete this year because he’d recently broken his right arm pretty severely so he has some righteous scars, some metal plates (like wolverine) and a mind to take it easy for another 4 or 5 months.