Flying by the Seat of Our Plans

The first full day of my trip, Ali and I packed up the car and headed north from their house to Hallstatt, Austria.  The weather was spectacular and the scenery and food were both distracting.  We stopped in NE Italy, home of famous prosciutto.  This shared meal of prosciutto on cantaloupe was one of the best meals of the trip with the best melon I have ever had.  The view wasn't bad, either....  The Alps came on suddenly and increased in size dramatically as we flew through each mountain tunnel.  The architecture in Austria is also exactly what one would expect, but prettier.  The region we drove through here is where they filmed the Julie Andrews film "Sound of Music", so, of course, we had that as our soundtrack. We got to our hotel just in time to stroll into picturesque Hallstatt for a traditional Austrian dinner.  Ali and Sean had raved about the Austrian food over Italian food and they were right; everything we had in A...

We caught the low tide on the final day, so we waded out to an oyster bar to look for little critters and scope out all of the birds.  Laura counted over fifty herons on one huge sandbar!  The closer sandbar had some of Laura's favorites--white pelicans. We headed out to fish some more, and again came up empty.  We had intended to stay three nights, but a lot of rain and cooler weather were on the way the next day.  That, coupled with the slow fishing and the need to wash salt off of lots of gear the next day, motivated us to modify our plan to head out after lunch.   Overall, the experience got a grade of B.  We got so lucky with with weather with overnight temps in the 50s and daytime temps in the 60s and 70s.  We also dodged a bullet with the bugs.  We had brought half-a-dozen different potions to try to fend off no-see-ums, but we only encountered them for about an hour the fir...

We slept in during the lowest part of the tide.  It was a foggy morning, so we had a casual breakfast on the beach before heading out to fish.  We had high hopes after our success the first day, thinking we had a better idea of where to fish now.  Unfortunately, we only got three hits and didn't land any of them.  We tried a lot of different spots throughout the day, to no avail, but we did enjoy seeing some birds and very few people. We spotted some dowitchers and a dunlin (far right) on an oyster bar (thanks Beth for the ID!) Had some fun with a locally sourced hat, and then had to take a bath after it dripped all over me.  It gave Laura a chance to photograph me for once. We went back out to try again.  Let's just say that it was good that we brought some steak for dinner. Then it was time to head back out to the beach for more crab (and gastropod) photography! Laura had a gr...