Adventures - day 1

We arrived in the historic old city on time. The weather was ... WARM?! Unusual for the best of times.

As we walked the train station platform, memories flooded back. I'd walked that platform so many times ... with some one else waiting for me at the end of the platform. That was history, this was now.

We exited the station and I quickly got my bearings. We headed for them thar hills and made our way up steep inclines that mountain goats would be proud to roam.

I played Julie, the cruise director, as I pointed out various sites of no real particular interest, recounting various bits of juicy sorted stories pulled out of my memory.

In no time we found the hotel we'd call home base for the weekend. We checked in, dumped our stuff and were out the door as fast as we could each exit the bathroom. We tramped up to the boardwalk near the more famous lodging and looked at some of the touristy sites such as the funicular and the ice slide choosing to by pass these items for a leisurely walk up the 312 stairs to the park and plains above. We emptied out to the park and tramped our way across snow-drifted paths. I chatted about my experiences of living there for 10 months filling the air with my history, leaving something of myself behind like the former inhabitants and defenders of this city had done too.

We passed through the makings of the winter carnival festival grounds (good thing to because we'd have had to pay $16 each to enter 24 hours later!)

We tramped to the main street and window shopped dinner menus as we walked back to the hotel to change damp socks and headed out again to walk the streets. We found a tiny tiny, well-known hole in the wall café and had supper before we did our rounds of the sites again before returning to our hotel to watch TLC.