Rogla to Austria

I got a little excited about the Dachstein so I had to put that video up before I did a real blog. However, now I am ready to talk a little about Rogla and share some more photos from that part of the trip.

Rogla is interesting. It’s a little microcosm of vacationland, and it’s pretty isolated. Basically it’s a small resort perched on the top of the tallest hill around. The weather is sporadically awesome mixed with stiff wind and lots of fog. The trails are pretty good and there can be a lot of snow there. Last year we had 6 feet of snow, although this year there was only around 6 inches. The alpine slide still kicked butt this year, and the food was just as fun. It seems to me that Rogla’s food consists mainly of deep fried amazingness, a routine salad bar, and less than sugary desserts. There are occasionally some distinctly un-american dishes like whole cooked fish and deep fried carbohydraty balls. Literally, they look like doughnut holes:

Although I suppose it’s better than eating potatoes with your meat every single time. Some of the desserts taste like dessert, but a lot of them taste like they need some serious sweetener in order to be allowed to follow dinner.

The racing in Rogla was interesting for me, I had one of the worst distance races of my life followed by one of my better ones this year. The classic race left massive room for improvement and I used some of that room in the skate race. Fitz however had some impressive results, finishing 6th in the classic race and 5th in the skate. She was next to me in the start of the mass start skate race, so she did some serious moving up! I was super stoked for Fitz. She is really kicking some butt this year!

On the drive to Austria on Monday we stopped at a little truckstop called Lanzeit for lunch. If you ever get a chance to go to one of those, definitely go.

It’s basically like a very gourmet food court, and it was hard to choose what to eat. Everything looked absolutely amazing.

Here is another shot from the drive:

This is how you know you are in Austria, the border looks like this. It’s a pretty sweet way to leave Slovenia!

Our hotel in Ramsau was no disappointment either. It’s a great little place called Kobaldhof, and the food here is much better than the Lanzeit even. If I thought the Rogla buffet was causing dietary distress, I know this is going to be worse for my self control! I will try to take photos of breakfast tomorrow because it’s awesome. There is honeycomb out that you eat chunks of like candy! The milk is probably fresh from the cow this morning, and there are all kinds of good nutty breads. Really, it’s great.

The top two photos are of the Kobaldhof sign and our hotel, the bottom one is the view from Fitz and I’s window. Obviously we’re roughing it in Austria.

Tomorrow we’re doing some race prep, and Friday we start our three day series here. It’s going to be sweet! The last race is a 10k classic handicapped start, so it’s going to be a good chance to catch people. Hopefully tomorrow I take some more photos of the venue and breakfast so I can share some more envy-inducing aspects of Austria. Auf Wiedersehen!