The trip to Zurich

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Trip Start Jul 14, 2007 Previous
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  Bregenz, Austria
Tuesday, August 28, 2007

We set out for Bregenz, but stopped for an adventure through the ice caves. We drove to Werfen where the largest ice caves in Europe exist. We hike 20 minutes, road a cable car up 500m and then hiked 20 more minutes to get to a small opening in the side of a cliff. These ice caves are 42km long and were discovered in 1819. The first tours of the place started at the turn of the century and took 8 days to go 1km. Thankfully it only took us an hour to 1 km, even though there was 700 stairs involved. It was literally freezing inside and by the end of the hour my jeans and zip up hoodie weren´t doing me any good. It was well worth it though. The formations and the natural caverns were just fascinating. There was one ice formation that looked like a polar bear, but when you walked around to the other side it looked like a elephant. Pretty amazing stuff. We managed to meet a Canadian traveling alone and befriended her. We gave her a ride back to Salzburg on our way out. We made it Bregenz way past dinner time, but still had a fabulous meal at the hotel restaurant.

The next day we decided to take a ferry over to the German island of Lindau. It took about 20 minutes on Lake Konstanze to arrive in this quaint village. We meandered the streets for a couple hours, admiring the little cobble stone roads and the elaborately painted town hall building. We went into two churches situated beside each other. The first one was catholic and was elaborately decorated. The second was Protestant and was very simple. It was pretty remarkable to see the difference. You could definitely tell which congregation had more money! We needed to get to Zurich so we hopped back on the ferry, eating lunch on the way over, and started the drive.

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