Adventure | How two girls keep their lad friendship alive
Women can’t park, they’re obsessed with pink and have no idea how to unscrew a quick-release yet alone set-up their bikes. Let’s be honest, there might be thousands of these stereotypes but there are also many who disprove them – including Antonia and Carola, two friends who aren’t scared of getting their hands dirty, show up most of the guys when it comes to tech talk and love to clamber into an old VW with their bikes for a trip. This is the tale of their last mountain hut adventure in the Tyrolean mountains.
Lovingly christened the ‘Madame’, the rickety, white VW T3 trundles to a start and we’re off, leaving the city in our wake and shaking off work and university stress in favour of a relaxed weekend up in a mountain hut. No mod cons, no frills (although we’ve made sure that the hut has running water, a shower and a wood burner); this is going to be anything but luxurious, and will consist of our favourite trio: bikes, beer and mountains.
It’s 6pm on Friday. The sun is long gone and it’s now pouring down. The poor Madame is struggling to keep up with the windscreen wipers. “It looks a bit like snow,” says Carola, putting our plans for the so-called ‘allotment tour’ into doubt. Climbing about 1,000m metres in total, a large part of the route is above the treeline. But as my grandpa always said in his infinite wisdom: “there’s always a way.” Anxieties settled, we cruised onwards.
Outside is bitterly cold so we head inside as soon as we reach the hut, seeking solace from the incessant rain. As I carry out the now-mandatory spider-check, Carola gets the old range cooker going and we crack open two beers with a satisfying hiss. Cheers! On the drive up we’d stopped to catch some fish, which were now sizzling in the pan. The temperature in the hut gets toasty and we quickly turn off the agitated fire alarm before it causes any undue hassle. Chatting about life, love and other four letter words, the red wine and long day take their toll and we decide it’s time to roll into bed.
The next morning as we peer sleepily out the window we realise that it did actually snow just above the hut. As the trails still look pretty clear, we stick to our plans, stocking up on a substantial breakfast before wrapping up for a little loop.
We set off uphill on wet fire roads which turn into soaking, snowy fields, and our tyres make a satisfying crunch as they roll over the frosty ground. Our fingers are starting to numb into place on the brake levers and our toes are in agony as we’re forced to walk for a short section. We need to warm up, we decide and reach for the hip flask, which is filled with hazelnut schnapps for some brief respite.
Having given up on the map and stowed it safely away in the backpack, we rely on our intuition. After all, isn’t the journey the destination? Without any desperate need to find a trail, it’s even nicer when we do spot a turn-off and dip down onto a trail a few seconds later. We speed downhill, ticking off the altitude in our legs and loving every second – even more so when the trail spits us out just 1km from the hut.
Ok, hands up, the cliché about women not being able to read maps does apply to us – we’ll admit that. But does it even matter? Wasn’t it our female intuition and inner-GPS that came through in the end? Sometimes it’s better when things aren’t all planned, and you let yourself sink into an adventure. And that’s exactly what we did.
Pictures: Christoph Bayer Words: Antonia Buckenlei
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