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Street Prophets Friday: Romp! [1]

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Date: 2023-02-17  

We finally got out for a few days of skiing and it looks like it will be my only bit of Alpine schwooshing for the whole season. Last Wednesday we drove deep into the Austrian Alps and stayed in a clean and cozy penzion owned by a young farming family. My little foursome arrived first and we settled in and waited for the others to arrive: my sister-in-law and her two adult sons, and a friend of ours with her two lads.

The next day we got an early start and I fear I overdid it. The next day, I decided to take it easy and just went for a 10K hike over to the next village with my nephew (who had also overdone the schwoosh).

It was very cold, but pleasant enough once we got out from under the shadow of the mountains.

We were greeted by this 5.2 meter tall giant (costume) in a glass case.

I think his name is Samson— shame I don’t read German, but it looks like each village in this region has one of these giants.

We had passed a curious, icy track that we assumed was for some sort of racing. On the way back we discovered what it was for. It was a training ground for skidding. There were a variety of cars driving around the track, gunning their motors and purposefully sending their cars skidding across the ice. My sister-in-law had attended a course for learning to control skids, so I had some idea of what was going on. While we watched, one car skid into a 270 degree spin and ended up in a low snowbank . The next car on the track stopped, put on its hazard lights, and waited until the car behind it caught up, stopped and put on its hazard lights— before they proceeded to reposition their car and pull the stuck car out of the snowbank with a tow rope. I was impressed by how smoothly the whole operation was executed.

As we continued our walk, I told my nephew about my father learning to control skids on a mudflat on the banks of the Mississippi in Iowa and how one of my crazier brothers did similar stunts on the frozen lakes of Madison, Wisconsin. Me? I learned on the hard streets of that city.

That course looks like a lot of fun though.

Thanks for stopping by. Surely it's calmer in here than in the frothy madness of the yowling rec-list today.

This is an open thread.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/17/2153540/-Street-Prophets-Friday-Romp

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