Last week, after a stressful teaching week for Anette, another bout with the monster cough which regularly comes to perch on Adinah's chest, and the attendant sleep-deprived nights for all of us, I got an evil idea. "Look, let's just take some money out of the savings account and go to Gösing." Anette agreed that it was a terrible, very bougeoise notion, so that's exactly what we did.
The Alpenhof Gösing is our sanctus sanitorum. It's a posh but slightly frumpy hunting lodge, about three hours outside of Vienna, and it sits just beneath a cruel mountain called Ötscher. There's an indoor pool, a sauna and a steam bath. The train from Vienna drops you off about fifty feet from the front door, so you can just stagger in, put down your bags and turn your brain off for a few days.
Since we started bringing Adinah up here, we never really do much more than pool, steam bath, shower, repeat. The kid is NOT into hiking. But yesterday, by distracting her with bubble gum and story-telling, the three of us managed to trek all the way up to a beautiful meadow, maybe half a mile above the hotel. We spent the whole time running up and down the cowshit-covered slopes, shouting our names and then listening for the echoes, and examining a purple earthworm. And we found two puddles with about a hundred frog eggs inside. It was awesome.
In anticipation of our future visits, Adinah renamed the place Chocolate Easter Bunny Meadow.
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