My "business trip" to Germany

In fact, I did take a business trip to Germany last week.  But, that would be a really boring subject for most people to read about.  But, because I was in the area, I was able to extend my trip a few days at the end and flew down to Bulgaria to see Zac.  He was there alone, as Fiona, Nuala, Bran, and new baby Maeve were in Texas where Maeve was just born a month earlier.  So anyway, it really worked out pretty well.  I arrived Friday afternoon, and we briefly stopped by their house to change, and headed to Rila mountain.

It was supposed to be sunny and clear, but the weather didn't cooperate. When we parked the car where we planned to start hiking it was starting to get cloudy.

The map I am holding is the wrong map.  The correct one was still on a table at Zac's house.  Oh well, someone from his work basically explained where we where going and we both had a GPS, so we couldn't get too lost...

The climb at the beginning was pretty tough.  The snow was really deep and hill was pretty steep. We climbed about 3000 feet in only a couple miles. 

We were having a great time though, both loving the outdoors a lot.  However, when the sun started to go down the reward was big!

It was not too long after this that the wind started to pick up and it started to snow again.  We were looking up to the top of the ridge line and had hoped to climb all the way to the top before stopping for the night, but with the snow starting to pick up and it getting dark pretty quickly we picked the last grouping of trees we saw and stopped there.  Turned out that was really smart, as we didn't really find any other good places even the following day to pitch the tent.

We didn't really plan for such extreme weather, so the night in the tent wasn't the best.  The tent itself was not a mountaineering one, so it didn't hold in the heat as well.  Plus, as I had to either bring my gear from home or borrow from Zac, I ended up not having a sleeping pad, so basically was sleeping directly on the snow.  The wind howled throughout the night, and was actually blowing fine snow dust into the tent through the air vents.  Look at some of our gear that was outside the tent, but under the rain fly.  When we woke up it was 19 degrees F outside.

So on our second day the snow was coming down pretty hard and we had a pretty constant wind blowing at us, gusting up to about 35 MPH.  So whenever we stopped we got cold pretty quickly.  Look at how the wind was blowing the snow onto one side of my hat. 

We basically followed the ridge line up to a peak (not the top of the mountain) where we really needed to decide what to do next. 

So we hiked over to the edge where there were some rock outcroppings that we thought we could get a little shelter from the wind (which was getting stronger) and have something to eat and drink.  Our drinking tubes to our water bladders were frozen, so we didn't have water to drink since we left camp. 

So the wind just kept picking up and by the time we had boiled water we decided instead of having hot chocolate and then oatmeal for lunch, we would just have chocolate oatmeal in order to get moving again soon.  The temperature had dropped to 17 degrees F.  Here are a couple of shots though looking out from where we were sitting.  The big patch with no rocks in it is one of the seven Rila lakes.  We were able to see five of them during our hike.

Because the weather was looking like it was going to stay bad and maybe get worse we made the decision to start back down.  We had already decided not to spend another night, because it was so cold and there wasn't a lot of good sheltered areas up where we were.  But of course as it would work out, when we where about half way down the sun started to come out again and we got a chance to see some great views while we hiked out.

So after we got back to the car we drove around to the other side of the mountain where a famous monastery (Rila Monastery) is located.  You can see the top of Rila mountain (snow covered) to the left of the monastery in this picture.

The monastery itself was really cool.  The entire inside was full of paintings (all done by the same artist) of either Bible stories, or of saints.  You can kinda see a couple paintings, and the idea of the style from this picture.

After visiting the monastery, we headed back to Zac's house, had showers, went out for dinner, and then both slept really really well in real beds.  The next day Zac took me around the area a little to show me Sofia (only a little though, because Julie, the kids and I are planning to go there next year), and then hung out at his house playing a couple video games (I am not good at video games) and watching a TV show about climbing Everest.  Then on Monday I had a flight at 6 AM to head home. 

It was a great weekend.  The hike of course was the highlight as it was the plan.  But just being able to hang out with Zac was pretty cool as I don't see him very often.