Pentecost Snow / Pfingsten Schnee

We arrived in Schladming yesterday to green hills and mountains, flowers blooming, and things looking like spring. Just as we stepped out of the car, the cool, cloudy day turned cold, windy, and rainy. It poured all afternoon. It poured all night. We kept looking out for snow, but couldn’t tell (it is dark out here in the countryside at night) if it was raining or snowing. When we woke up this morning, it was still drizzling, and our view of green was glazed with snow, the higher mountains completely hidden in the clouds.

We spent a lot of time deciding what we wanted to do with our wet, frigid day. Starting yesterday, it is Sommer Card season here and every visitor receives a special card which entitles them to free cable car rides, free pool entries, free rounds of mini golf, free museum entries, etc. There are so many options, though not so many when the weather is more wintry than summer, and so we finally decided to take the cable car up the Planai mountain despite the fact that the peak was somewhere up in the clouds.

The ride up was fun, starting with a picturesque view back to town.


Not quite half way up, the ground was suddenly snow covered, and not long after that we entered the clouds.
Just next to the cable car station at the peak is a playground. I had imagined that Nikolas would enjoy playing there for quite some time, but it was buried under a good eight inches of snow. Visibility was low, the wind was high, and it was cold! We weren't dressed for winter, but we weren't quite ready to simply turn around and jump into another cable car and head back down. Instead, we followed a sign for Onkel Willy’s Hütte (Uncle Willy's Cabin) pointing off into the clouds down a sloppily shoveled path. We would have turned back many times if it weren’t for oompa music wafting through the clouds toward us (a completely surreal experience), beckoning us onwards.

Not too far down this path and around a bend (but far enough that we were freezing in our lightweight jackets) we reached the Hütte, a beautiful old Austrian lodge serving hot soup and hearty fare and packed out with other people who had ventured up into the clouds on such a miserable day. While normally on May 30 you could sit out on the terrace enjoying amazing views, we settled inside and enjoyed the fact that, while not quite what we had hoped for our Pfingsten weekend, it was, indeed, a great adventure.