Man Weekend (Guest Author)

While a frequent contributor to the photos on the blog, the time has come for me to test out my writing skills for the first time in many years (let’s not pretend that accounting memos count). For my birthday, my amazing wife got together with a couple of my expat friends, Ryan and Trevor, and planned a man weekend for us – canyoning and rafting in Haiming, Austria.

Our good friends loaned us their car for the weekend and we set out Friday night - our first order of business was to secure a “vignette”, a windshield sticker for driving on the Austrian highways (cost: 8 euro) to avoid paying the fine if we were caught by a traffic camera (cost: 240 euro).  But apparently all the gas stations on the Swiss border decided to close too early, so we were well into Austria before we could find one. So…we're really hoping our friends don't get a little surprise in the mail in the coming weeks!

Aside from that, we made our way to Imst Friday night and then on to Haiming on Saturday without any trouble. Haiming is a sleepy little town, primarily just known for its outdoor sports…so we were in the right place. Up first – canyoning, which is basically hiking down a river canyon using whatever means necessary, hiking, swimming, climbing, jumping, sliding, or abseiling/rappelling. I was a little concerned when I heard the water was 6 degrees (which means 43 to you and me), but our wetsuits kept us more than warm enough. I really enjoyed the abseils and the slides and jumps, which reminded me a bit of Johnson Shut-Ins State Park back home.



Our guide was great, and we met an Australian who we talked into rafting with us the next day.



No we didn't canyon down this one..maybe next time.



After warming up with some Zipfer and Schnapps (apparently big in Austria, who knew?), we went to a campground just outside Haiming for some R+R and grilling up some brats…once we convinced the campground host (whom we had just met an hour before) that we weren’t “gypsies” trying to freeload on the campground grill. We finished the night at Oilers, a local establishment, specializing in American 80’s rock...I mean, what else would you expect?

Sunday we rafted the Inn River, one of Europe’s best, but as it was a little late in the season, we did an easier section than we had hoped, with just class II/III rapids.  But still the water moved well and there were some were good rapids. We even hopped out to take a few short swims (for about 2 minutes, when our legs went numb!) All in all, it was a great trip and I’m already looking forward to planning the next man weekend in the Spring – even bigger and better!  

We had another fun guide who shared some crazy stories and told us about all the brilliant questions he had been asked. My person favorite was “do those rocks go all the way to the bottom?”

 

Our fearless leaders Ryan and Trevor manned the front of the boat, where they could set the pace (and take on the most water!)