Mountain Views

Watching the Winter Olympics and seeing the beautiful mountains around Vancouver, reminded me of sitting in the lower level den of our house in Woodridge, Illinois, during the Innsbruck Olympics and becoming enraptured by the photos of the Austrian Alps.

I promised myself, “Some day I must see those mountains.”

“Some day” was 1978, on the trip to Europe I made with my 13-year-old son, David. After visiting with David’s older brother, stationed with the Army in Frankfurt, we drove down through the German Tyrol.

Our rental car was a cranky Opal. There are no speed limits on the autobahn. I floor-boarded the accelerator, but that little Opal would not go faster than 80 mph. Mercedes and BMW’s flew past us going 135 or 150.

Compounding my terror, we were driving through rain and fog. Somehow we made it over the Austrian border and into Innsbruck. Where were the mountains? The fog and rain came down from Germany with us. David and I spent three days in Innsbruck, and the fog never lifted. For all we saw of mountains, we could have been in West Texas.

On our last day there I drove up over the Bremmer Pass. As we came down into Italy, before us was a picture-postcard view of the Dolomites, snow-capped and gorgeous!

I went to Austria to see mountains and at last found them in Italy.