JP is doing the great Everything We've Been Up To post and I am trying to cover half a dozen other things so this is just a list of my thoughts or fun things I have seen (in no particular order):

1. It's really nice not to be tied to a computer any more. it's doing my lower back a lot of good. It's also, on the whole, very nice to be outdoors so much.

2. My shoulders have been giving me surprisingly little gip. In fact, the walking and carrying everything is surprisingly comfortable. We already feel fitter.

3. Austrians are not as obsessed with Health and Safety as some English. For example, the trams\trains continue up into the hills around Innsbruck. We came across some of the tracks as we were walking. No fences, just a sign with a big red cross on it. You are allowed to walk over the tracks - that´s where the trail continues and it´s refreshing to just be trusted to not be silly about it. That would never happen in England. There are also a lot of steep, narrow paths that are not fenced (sometimes they could rather do with it!) so perhaps that´s the other side of it.

4. We need to eat more now. It's rather obvious but JP almost collapsed on day 2 becuase it hadn´t really occured to us. So now we're obsessive about the calorie content of any food we eat which is not something I've done before.

5. I am less good at navigating than one might hope. So far I've taken us precisely the wrong way down a steep hill that we then had to go back up. Another time, I made us do a 45 minute detour which brought us back to where we had started. I am beginning to be more careful but I am sure that this will happen again.

6. Bringing a tin whistle without a case was never really going to work. A few days ago I tripped over it and it bent in half. I hadn't even used it much, especially here, but having had it has shown me that I would like to get a new, better one, with a case as I enjoyed playing it.

7. Ant nests in the wild are phenomenal. We passed two whilst walking the Trinser Steig (´the climb to Trins´) a couple of days ago. First one, just under a foot high and just over a foot wide. The second was even bigger and both were swarming with red ants. I stared in awe and backed away.

8. We slept in a hostel two nights ago - JP went to sleep early, without making his bed and woke up with a start, demanding why I had both duvets. After a little confusion, I pointed out to him that he had a duvet but was using it as a pillow and his pillow as a duvet.

9. The Austrian obsession with Mozart continues apace. Here in Innsbruck, there is a hotel that proudly proclaims that 'Mozart lived here' and he wrote about Innsbruck in his diary (old German, I think, as I and my dictionary didn´t understand it). It's omething nice, I assume, since they published it on a plaque. All very well and dandy until you look at the dates dn realise that he 'lived' here for all of 6 days in 1769. He would have barely had time to unpack and probably spent more time in Paris.

10. Turns out JP can speak German (well, some) which has taken both of us by surprise. This is only one example and to extrapolate would be unscientific but what if this turns out to be a theme...

With that, I must get back to catching up on Mad Men, I mean, finishing my work. There may be a lot to be said for leaving the world behind but there are still some bits I miss.