Team Retreat

We had our yearly team retreat at the beginning of June.  Our team leader suggested that if we have the retreat be in the summer time that we do it somewhere in the mountains (since the summers tend to get hot and there’s not usually air conditioning).  Sadly, Hungary is a very flat country, but it is surrounded by 7 countries that have mountains.  Gary recommended Hallstatt, Austria.  He and I have both been there (at different times as singles), but none of the others on our team had been there.  It is a small, quaint village in the mountains of Austria, just a 5 hour drive from here.  So, that is what we did.

In past our retreats were working retreats.  The other women on the team wanted to have more free time, what many would call a ‘real’ retreat.  I, personally, liked working a lot on the retreats, but I am a person that likes church business meetings.  However, having a chance to hike in the mountains outweighs day long meetings any day in my book.  So, I was thankful that our team leader decided to do 1/2 working days and 1/2 free days.  Of course, Gary and I would have loved to have hiked on all of our 1/2 free days, but we were the only ones on the team who would have felt that way.  We did get to go hiking twice, so that was nice.  And, the weather ended up being wonderful. You can’t really tell well by this picture, but the village is right on a lake, and mountains shoot up out of the lake all around it.Here is a little bit of a view as we are walking to the top of the town for one of the hikes up the mountain behind the town.The owner of the pension where we stayed offered to take us on a free boat ride on the lake.  It was a long boat that held 4-6 people and he stood in the back and rowed it.  Our teammates let us borrow their little life jacket for Ethan.  There is a Protestant church and Catholic church in the background.One of the days we hiked through part of a valley and up to a waterfall.  There was no way to get the splendor of God’s creation in a picture.  Even where we were standing in the picture above, we were getting wet from the spray coming off of the fall.  One of the girls on our team said that it was the prettiest thing that she has ever seen.  This picture does NOT do it justice at all.This is part of the same waterfall.Nap time!