Walk to Aach

Thursday 4 April

As forecast we awoke to an overcast sky with the promise of snow, so we decided to have a quiet day and signed up for a two hour walk to Aach a village across the hills.

After lunch we set out with eight others and we hadn’t reached the woods when is started to snow, not the puny pretend snow flakes we are used to in Oz but big fat fluffy flakes about the size of a fifty cent coin floating gently down, so it wasn’t long before everything was coated in white. It was pleasant walking as there wasn’t any wind and the conditions were quite comfortable.

Our walk took us through woods, across farmer’s fields on public right of ways and along sealed footpaths past several farm houses. Walking along a bit further we arrived at an old farm house where the huge barn had been converted into an antique shop, filled with paintings, furniture and bric-a-brac and jewellery dating back to the 1800s and earlier. The highlight for us was two old horse drawn sleighs, which we had only seen previously in photos and paintings.

We eventually arrived at a stream and waterfall with a small footbridge across it, on the other side of the bridge was a sign with a coat of arms and one of the walkers explained that we were about to cross into Austria, on our side was a sign with the German emblem.

Walking through the fields in Austria we came to another stream with an old covered bridge which we walked through, further along the track there was another footbridge across a stream and a sign on the other side, which one of our companions translated. It said we weren’t to enter Germany unless we had a passport, as ours were back at the resort we just had to “border hop”.

Arriving at the village of Aach we all entered a small restaurant for afternoon tea, which depending on various tastes varied from beer and white sausage, potato cakes, salad and in our case, coffee with the most delicious home-made apple strudel with ice cream, this probably returned, with extras, the calories we had burnt climbing the hills on our walk.

To complete an enjoyable afternoon the resort mini-bus picked us up and we arrived back at the resort four hours from the start of our walk. It had started to snow heavily again so we sat in our room watching the flakes floating past our balcony, beautiful to watch sitting in a warm room.