OCTOBER 3. Pörtschach

Another uneventful 4 hour train ride to Portschach.  What  scenery,  a real feast for the eye.  As we zoom through, we are often nestled between the greenest of mountains and we can see small villages in the valley below.  The Tyrolean architecture  with the balconies adorned with flower boxes generously filled with blooms of all colours. My vocabulary cannot do justice to the beauty of this place.  Upon our arrival, we walked to our little pension.  It is called Pension Kitty and inside, there are Hello Kitty decorations.  There is a nice large yard with apple trees and flower beds where we will surely sit today.  Too bad that we are only here for less than 24 hours.  We will therefore make the best of it and go explore it immediately after checking in.  

After a long walk, on this beautiful sunny afternoon, we picked up some  afternoon snacks and shared them sitting in the beautiful yard.  Later on, we walked into the town, meandering through a beautiful park, along Lake Wörthersee.  This town is a summer resort so it is quite deserted and most businesses are now closed until next Spring.  Jörg has found us a really good restaurant where we all shared very delicious tapas.  We all return to our B&B, quite exhausted but very satisfied with our day.

This morning, after breakfast and before leaving on the train, destination Ljubljana, we went on another hike.  As we were passing the church, Bernie noticed that the priest was Indian.  We went and introduced ourselves.  He is originally from Andrapradesh, has been in Austria for 3 years and appears to speak fluent  German.  We took pictures with him and some parishioners told Bernie that they really liked him.    Walking through this picturesque place, we crossed so many babbling brooks, their bancs  overloaded with all kinds of wild flowers.
We returned to pick up our luggage. Just picture this, we are so loaded up -  six suitcases, a pram, numerous backpacks, at least 3 bags of various grocery items.  It is quite difficult to manoeuvre the narrow but fairly high steps of these old trains. We all know that we need to board this train very quickly, stay close to the doors with all this gear because in 15 minutes, we will have to disembark and rush onto another train and this, in seven minutes.  OMG our train arrives there one minute late, we have now only six minutes.   We need to get down to another level, always with all this gear, make our way back up to reach the next platform.   As unbelievable as it seems, we make it with seconds to spare.  We settle in for a two hour ride, in a very tiny six seater compartment.  Jörg using all his muscle power, lifts our luggage up on some shelves. Maria and I have a huge suitcase under our feet, I am totally covered with bags and Maria has a baby who wants to be fed.  This is when we find out that there are some repair work on the tracks and we will all have to exit the train in 30 minutes and be reloaded on a bus for a 90+ minute trip.  It is absolute chaos.  We managed to fit all our stuff in the luggage hold of the bus only to find out there are no more seats available.  We are told we will have to board the next bus.  We explain that our luggage is on this bus and  they open the hold.  We repeat this whole operation again, this time successfully.   As incredible as it may seem, we are all still in a good mood and laughing.  This trip was meant to be a new experience to be added to our bucket list and it definitely is.  We are probably the only happy people at this moment on this old rickety bus.  I forgot to mention that as crowded as we were in the compartment, I managed to dig out buns, cheese and salani and, during what was left of  the 30 minutes,  everyone ate including Valerie.  
Let's see what our next destination will be like.