Winter is coming to Kitzsteinhorn

Winter is coming! No joke this time. 🙂

We moved the clock one hour back last night so I hoped that I will sleep one more hour today but my inner clock is not adjusted yet so I got up one hour earlier than usual in the morning. We were all alone in the restaurant for breakfast, I guess the other guests managed to sleep more. I had some Bircher muesli, 2 mini croissants and a coffee for breakfast while waiting for the weather to decide itself, it was supposed to be nice and sunny today but it was cloudy and foggy in the morning. I planned to go up on the top of the mountain today and it would have been great if it would have been sunny so I can just sit in the sun and read like I usually do but I did not get my wish. It stayed cloudy while day but nevertheless I decided to stick to the plan and I got a pedestrian ticket to the top from the hotel reception and we drove to the lift.

The parking lot was full and there were so many people. I expected this since it’s Sunday, not only tourists go skiing today but the locals too. After what felt like forever, we took the 2 lifts and were at the middle station. It was cold and cloudy, -1 degrees Celsius, so I walked around just a bit before taking the next lift to the top of the mountain called Gipfelwelt where it was -4 degrees Celsius. Brrr! It’s so crazy that just a few meters below it’s colorful autumn and up winter is here!!!

Gipfelwelt has a cinema showing a short video about the Hohe Tauern National Park, a gallery of the national park accessible through a tunnel within the mountain at 25% incline (that was quite a workout, climbing down and up again!) and a platform to look out from the top of Salzburg. It was so foggy that I didn’t even see the tip of my nose and it literally started to snow (my first time this season! <3) so I went back to the middle station to meet up with my boyfriend for lunch. We shared a Kaiserschmarrn but the restaurant was so full and it was cold outside so I decided to call it a day and leave the winter behind, I took the lifts down from the mountain and the bus back to Kaprun, where it’s still autumn (I missed the bus by 1 second so I had to wait for 30 minutes for the next one 😦 ).

It was still early so I changed into my running clothes and went out for a run. Sunday is runday after all. 🙂 I planned to do a comfortable 5K run for the Freeletics running coach. I headed across the city center and took the bicycle road towards Bruck. I wanted to turn back after half of the 5K was done but it was so nice that I just kept running until I got to Bruck and finished the 5K. I obviously had to get back somehow so I started an interval run that my Freeletics running coach planned for me this week, 10 rounds of 400m run with 2 minutes break, and sprinted back to Kaprun before it got dark. This run to Bruck and back was amazing and I’ve met lots of cows, horses, dogs and chickens. Sometimes it’s good to get out of the big city and breath some fresh air, even if it smells like the stinky animals from the nearby farms. 😛