Schleinsee and Degersee, Germany

Sept 23, 2012

Yesterday, I examined the hiking/biking trail map that we had picked up, in search of an easy-on-the-knees hiking trail. I found a couple of decent-sized lakes, with a walking path around them. A bit of Googling, and I found details on the trail. If you're interested, and can read German, check it out here. The trail is known as the "Rund um Schleinsee und Degersee", or the Loop around Lakes Schlein and Deger. The best part about that website is that it included a file that we could download onto our GPS. And while it didn't mention where we could park, we figured that if we went to the first coordinate on the track, we would be somewhat close.

And we made sure that we had some change in case there was a parking paystation there. But there wasn't.

When we got there, we were the third car parking just off the road by a field. By the time we returned, there were well over a dozen cars parked there, half of them in the field. Interesting.

It turned out that the trail was fairly popular, even though it appears to be in a fairly remote part of the country. We met at least 20 other hikers going the opposite direction to us. We know that there were others going in the same direction.

How remote, you might ask? After the hike, we went to a restaurant nearby (the Gasthaus Seerose, shown on the Google Earth map below). I asked for my usual "Cola Lite", and the waitress said to me "we're in the country - we can offer you Coke, but not Cola Lite". Interesting!

Speaking of which, here is the Google Earth view of our trek. It was just over 7 kms. Some gentle hills. My knees loved the hike.

It was a somewhat overcast day - the temperature was in the high teens.

The trail ranged from highway to single-file dirt track. Notice in these photos how I keep a respectful distance behind Stephen.

Now, for some view of the lakes. First, here is Schleinsee.

And now Degersee

With some fisher folk on it.

Some other interesting sights along the way. A lot of buildings had their south-facing roofs coated with solar panels.

We were observed by some cows while we were logging a geocache (that makes the 5th country in which we have found caches on this vacation).

We came along a bunch of apple trees with ripe apples right alongside the path. The trees seemed quite small for such large apples. We made like Adam and Eve - the apples were absolutely delicious!

A lot of the trail was through a dark forest. But occasionally, sunlight tried to shine through.

And, of course, there were flowers

As I mentioned, after the hike we had a bite at the nearby restaurant. It was a hoot, because it looked like their specialty was desserts, in particular apple strudel and ice cream, and a something crumble with ice cream. I asked the waitress if she knew what the something was in English. She couldn't think of it. She did confirm it was a fruit, and it came from the trees right next to the restaurant, and it was very good. Eventually, she remembered that they were plums. I had it. It was good.

Then we drove back to Bregenz, where we realized that the concept of just picking up something light from a bakery, as we usually do, was pretty well a non-starter, since the bakeries - and pretty well everything else commercial - are closed Sundays. For those who have not been to this neck of the woods, bakeries are not only everywhere, but they offer sandwiches as well as the really yummy stuff. For example, within a couple hundred meters of the hotel, there are probably 6-8 bakeries.

Anyway, we did find one that was open, and it offered a sort of hamburger, so that was our protein for the day.

Stephen would really like to go back to Liechtenstein for a hike tomorrow. We shall see. (Yep, there's something weird about visiting Austria just so that we can go to the nearby countries to hike!)