Nass

Well, the rain didn't stop. So let me tell you the two new German words that I most often used during this second day of our hike: nass (wet) and gefaehrlich (dangerous).

We made our way up the slippery, muddy trail to the peak - Rotwand. It was really cool. But seconds after we reached it, the clouds came. We couldn't see the beautiful view in any direction and it began to pour. No pictures here for me. So I the water just kept coming. Anna was wearing a trashbag and many other smarter people were wearing raingear, but not me.

By the time we made it to the Rotwandhaus (a pit stop type place, very similar to the place that we stayed over night), I was soaked through. I changed my sweatshirt with a dry one from my bag, but I wanted to save my dry pants for later. Then, Ingrid and I went searching for hot chocolate. We ordered some in the restaurant while most everyone else was just trying to dry off. It sure hit the spot and warmed me up. But then someone stuck their head in and said that we were leaving. We had to chug our hot chocolate.

The hour immediately following the chugging of the chocolate, I was completely high on sugar. I had so much energy all of the sudden. This is when we really got to the singing. Since we were going downhill, I didn't need all of my oxygen as badly as before. Ingrid, Tiffany, Andre, and I sang horrible Disney songs, lame kareoke songs, and even Raffi songs all the way down the mountain. Other hikers just laughed at us, but it was so much fun. We were still wet, but we were wet and laughing so it seemed so much better.

After we ran out of songs to sing, I realized how badly that I had to go to the bathroom (a consequence of the chocolate chugging). Tiffany began explaining to us theories of Platetechtonics and other Geological mumbo-jumbo. It was actually really interesting and it kept my mind off of my bladder.

We were all wet and smelly and dead-tired...but we made it! We made it to a little town (that supposedly has an amazing spa/sauna that we really wanted to search for) where we picked up our bus.