Wednesday February 13th
In the afternoon today I met up with Mark and we went around
Vorarlberg to places we hadn’t seen yet. First I met up with him in his town
Höchst and we walked across the border to Switzerland to see the town of St.
Margaretha. It is a tiny little place and we didn’t see much to do. We looked
at train tickets to other parts of Switzerland but it was about 16 EUR a piece
minimum, which is too much for us for one afternoon. So we took the bus to
Dornbirn and stopped at the Messepark on a whim. We browsed MediaMarkt and
grabbed a Red Bull at SPAR then took the bus to the Bahnhof. There, we took the
train to Rankweil. My first host sister goes to school there. We walked through
town and out of chance an American guy asked us where we were from. He was from
Oregon and had been living in Austria since he came to Germany to build a golf
course in the 90’s. It was a crazy coincidence really, he had lived in Mark’s
town for 9 years, even went to the school Mark took his SAT’s at. Also he
interviewed for a job in
Bozeman, and had been fly fishing multiple
times there. His name was Ron, I asked him if he met any civil engineers in
Bozeman, but he hadn’t. Would have been really crazy if he knew my dad. He
pointed us in the direction of a Döner shop, but first we went and checked out
the Basilica (not sure the difference between a Basilica/Church/Dome is other
than architecture). It was perched up on the hill and gave a great view of the
surrounding area. To bad it was foggy, otherwise we would have been able to see
across the Swiss border. It was, of course, beautiful inside. Every little town
here has an ornate church probably older than any church in America, but there
are so many they get overlooked. We grabbed a Döner after struggling to find it
and a drink from the market before getting back on the train to Dornbirn.
There, we decided to take the bus to Kehlegg, the little town above where I
live. There was nothing to see or do at all, the one Gasthaus was closed and
the church was new and unexciting really. We took the next bus down and had a
coffee in Café Sito. Mark headed home and so did I, although we planned a trip
to Gargellen for the weekend – Mark’s host family has a house up there.
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The train station in Switzerland |
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Re-entering Vorarlberg |
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Rankweil church |
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Everything connects here |
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Walking up to the church |
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Cool panorama |
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The edge |
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Inside |
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Cool organ |
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The church in Götzis |
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The church in Kehlegg. A lot of churches today |
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This is pretty much all the Kehlegg was |