Austria: into the Ötz Valley

After Innsbruck, Scott and I split up to try out two different blogger trips that were offered to the conference attendees. How can you not love a conference that comes with free travel at the end?

I went for the Relaxation in the Ötz Valley (Ötztal) trip. We’ve been to this part of Austria before, but always in winter to ski. The Alps feel like a different world in summer.

The trip from Innsbruck to the Ötz Valley took just over an hour by bus, and gave us plenty to look at along the way. Once we arrived, we spent most of the next 24 hours admiring the stunning views while enjoying two different spas, Hotel Bergland and Aqua Dome, each of which is going to need its own post to do it justice. I hadn’t spent much time at spas before this trip, as the idea of them mostly evoked awkward episodes of public nudity. It’s not even my own eventual nudity that bothers me so much; it’s having strangers naked all around me, assaulting my prudish American eyes with all their fleshy glory. I just can’t not look. But this post isn’t really about my puritanical upbringing, it’s about the Ötztal.

The day of our arrival was the day of the Ötztaler Cycle Marathon, in which hundreds of crazy people spend seven hours or more cycling a course that wanders up and down the Alps surrounding the valley. Luckily the most strenuous thing expected of us was an easy walk around the Piburgersee, a shallow mountain lake that gets warm enough to swim in in summer and cold enough to skate on in winter. I love interactive lakes.

Up next: details of my luxury spa experiences. OK, maybe not all the details – I’ll spare you the traumatic parts about how many old man penises entered my field of vision. Probably. You’ll also soon be hearing from Scott about what he was up to while I was relaxing in the Ötz Valley. I’ll give you a hint: it involved canyoning, whitewater rafting, and significantly less nudity.