The shock news of the month is that I'm back working for a living! Yep, with the tent business winding down for winter and the writing business as random as ever, i've had to face the music and go back to contracting (it was French Accordian music for those who want to know what sort of music I had to face and the accordian player was accompanied by an entire troupe of white faced mime artists who kept forgetting their actions - one of them even spoke which just goes to show that even mime artists can forget their lines. So, the question is; is the mark of a bad mime one who has to explain what he's doing in words?). Anyway, I'm back to contracting for a few weeks (8 to be exact) for a company doing a data migration. It's very dull but it earns money and I am forced to get an awful lot of exercise in the process as I have to walk to and from the train station every day. I'm hoping that the hour and a half's walking every day will have had an effect on my waistline by Christmas (thus giving me an excuse to eat and drink too much - hee hee, what a cunning plan!). I've been here almost a week now and the dry atmosphere coupled with it being too hot is doing my head in!
Going back slightly to the last major event brings us to Thomas and Antje's wedding in Austria. This was an entire weekend devoted to them getting married again (ok, maybe I'd better explain. They got married in a civil ceremony last year and this was the full church wedding ceremony in a small Austrian church that the friends and family were allowed to attend. Oh, and Inga was allowed to bring that "bloody brit" as well. I'm pretty certain that's me). We flew into Fredricks-half-an-airport (or something like that) stuffed in to the usual flying cattle truck with the incredibly cool added detail that we landed right next to the place they build Zeppelins! How cool is that? I love airships and when I finally decide to grow up (or I'm reincarnated) I want to be an airship pilot (or an airship - reincarnation can be a strange thing at times). For people who have only ever seen them in films or burning, this is a modern airship:
They are awesome (and I don't use that word lightly, let me tell you!). Modern airships are extremely elegant (let's be honest, you can't get any more inelegant than a bloody great jumbo jet forcing its way through the skies causing massive environmental damage. If only they weren't so damn convenient!). So we landed in Fredericks-half-a-van (or something like that) and found our little rental car, an underpowerd Hyundai Accent (great for pottering around town, lousy for scaling mountains and trying to overtake huge lorries) and set off. First we went across Lake Konstanz on the ferry. I wasn't feeling at all well much to Inga's disgust so she stole the camera and took some nice shots as we crossed the lake 
. We visited Tortuga and had a nice little chat (ok, Inga chatted alot and I just smiled and nodded) before heading back across the lake and made a run for the hills. Now, when I say hills, what I mean are real hills. Mountainous foothills, not pathetic molehills. These hills soon changed into mountains and we made our way up winding switchbacks and across massive plateaus before Inga grudgingly agreed to stop and feed me food (she gets in these "driving moods" when all she wants to do is get there and nothing is allowed to get in the way of that including me starving to death or in this case illness). She then proceeded to eat my food (what can I say?) and we made our merry way into Austria.Now, being a man, I was map reading. I say map reading but we didn't actually have a real map. What we had was a dozen pages of google map directions and an address to aim for. Unfortunately, whilst I had the map I didn't fully understand where we were going so we promptly drove past our turning and headed deeper into the Austrian Alps. It's dark out there and full of scary trees and nasty switchback roads. Luckily Inga spotted my mistake and we performed a high speed handbrake turn in the face of an oncoming lorry and raced off the other way (yeah, right, in a Hyundai Accent?) and took the right turn to get us to a lovely mountain village called Biberwier. We even found the guest house! In the dark!
Unfortunately it failed to hold any guests as they had all buggered off to a restaurant in the nearby town. We dumped our stuff in our guest room and set off in hot pursuit. I say hot but what I really mean is slow and sedate due to the darkness and windy roads. Suffice to say we parked the car, made phone calls and eventually found them all, stuffed with fine food and just about ready to leave. I didn't get fed. I would have liked to, but Inga was tired and I decided in a fit of heroic barvado that her needs were far greater than mine. If I'd known we were going to go back and drink Austrian rocket fuel (aka schnapps) I would have lined my stomach with food to try and absorb the onslaught of alcohol flavoured with a vague taste of something that i think was alcohol. As the rest of the guests settled in to play "let's kill our livers", Inga and I beat a hasty and undignified retreat. In our defense, we had been travelling all day and they had been playing toursist. We stood on the balcony and gazed at the mountains with their hat of stars; strung out across the night sky like sparkling diamonds forever out of reach yet tempting you to try and grasp them. We decided not to and instead fell into an exhausted sleep. I would like to say the sleep of the just, but even my literary skills don't stretch that far!
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