Austrian Road Trip: Innsbruck

We’d sobered up from Oktoberfest, packed our dirndls, and prepared to wake up at a reasonable hour to drive to the mountains. The road trip through Austria was the primary aim of the trip. We picked up our car back at the Munich airport and left the city behind us in a whiz of tires on the Autobahn (literally, because there is no speed limit in Germany). I was disappointed that the international driver’s license I so proudly obtained to cross the border into Austria with my rental did not even receive a glance at the counter. There was no checkpoint between country borders either – all means of passage were overall casual.

En route to Innsbruck, we deviated a bit to visit the Dachau concentration camp. I’m not going to describe the experience in much detail because some things are only understandable in person. Friends told us that this was the “less depressing” of the concentration camps, whatever that means. All I’ll say is that every American should visit one at some point in their lives. Even if you know what happened and how horrible it was. The world continues to turn itself upside-down. Things we thought were impossible are now happening everywhere. And there are so many similarities. People think that the world was so different then, that some wild thing allowed this to happen in the distant past. But really, this was an example of how fragile and impressionable we are as humans. How a dictator can convince people to hate an imaginary enemy, to blame them for their struggles. How easy it was for regular people to become animals. So even though we know what happened, we visited to feel it up close. You can’t fight an enemy that you can’t see.  

Arriving in Innsbruck felt like a breath of fresh air. The mountains towered over brightly painted buildings, like a mix of the cities Bergen, Porto, and Zurich. Small alleyways wind through town and ornate buildings blend with flecks of modern. Everywhere there are outdoor cafes and bicyclists, which makes the streets feel alive. Our hotel overlooked some snowy peaks in the distance, and we settled in with citrusy cocktails to decompress from the drive. That night we had dinner at Die Wilderin down a quiet alley. We sat upstairs in a low-lit room and ate through plates of rare steak with wine. I learned that night that in Austria they serve every glass of wine with a glass of water, automatically. ONLY with wine. If you ask for water to accompany your beer, you get a funny look. This proved to be true all over the country.

The highlight of Innsbruck was getting to the top of the nearby mountains. A combination of trams/funiculars and a cable car ride bring you to “Top of Innsbruck” at Hafelekar. There the air becomes frosty, the wind swirls, and the mountains open in front of you. It felt like stepping into the vast space above the cloud line. Informational plaques told us about the effect of slow melting glaciers at the summit, which leave “kettle holes” in the rock that look like meteor crater sprinkles. In the winter, this area has the highest alpine skiing in the entirety of Europe.

We walked around for a long time up at the top, scrambling up small rock piles to see what was beyond them. Around a few bends of steep grainy pathways are areas so quiet that you can hear the silence like a ringing deep in your ears. It’s only broken briefly by the cheers of the birds. Black birds glide slowly across the summit, close enough to nearly scrap the jagged edges of rock.

Every so often the wind would blaze through, disturbing a horizontal layer of puff clouds and causing it to shoot into the air like steam from a kettle. In another second the puffs would evaporate, and the sky was blue again. The fullness of that open space between peaks is so familiar to me. No matter where I am, I wish I was here. The depth of the air, the cradle of the hills. How it feels like it has no start or end. I am a perfect little piece of nothing and everything. It’s like I was grown here.