Hiking Day 3

This was our final day of hiking.  With the issue of little kids, nap times, etc. hiking is a little different than what I used to do.  In the past I would have never ridden a cable car up a mountain when I could have hiked up it.  Not just because I didn’t want to pay the money, but I much preferred to hike.  Well, those days are gone…. at least temporarily.  We took a cable car up part of this mountain and then hiked from that point.  Otherwise, we wouldn’t have made much progress by the time it was Ethan’s naptime. You can’t see it but there is a cross on top of the mountain behind us.  We hiked up to this meadow but didn’t have time to hike up to the cross or some other areas.  We planned to get back in time for Ethan’s nap, and it would have been a couple more hours of hiking (without kids) to go up to the cross (thus more than 2 hours for us). 

When we were walking back to the car Ethan pointed to a tour bus and wanted to ride the bus.  He started walking over toward it and a woman was standing nearby.  He kept pointing to the bus, so she held her hand out and said something to him in German.  It looked like she was saying something about him going with her or he could go to his mom and pointed to me.  He held his hand up to take her hand to go with her, and she looked at me with this shocked look like she couldn’t believe he just did that.  I laughed because I was not so surprised at our little social butterfly.  It’s pretty bad if he will just go with a complete stranger who talks to him in a language that he doesn’t understand.  Course, he is used to being around people who speak different languages that he doesn’t understand.  Whatever the case, we will have to be real careful when we go to the States and will need to do some major work on stranger training.

Gary’s neck ended up hurting some with these hikes (you can see the posts from the end of June that talk about Gary’s back/neck problems).  Sadly, we forgot our walking canes which I need to take pressure off of my knees when hiking downhill.  My knees still hurt a week later. Maybe one day we can go back and take the kids when they can hike themselves.