The panorama walk

Today was another beautiful morning, sunny with blue skies and it was hot. After my morning gym session, some laundry and breakfast, we walked down to the village to get the gondola up the mountain. We were planning on doing a BIG walk today, but when picking up take away coffees we bumped into another friend and ended up chatting for about 45 minutes, so by the time we set off it was too late to do the planned 4.5 hour hike. We also heard that there was still bits of snow on that route so we changed our planned route. It was very hot but there is always water around from streams for Xena to drink. 

The walk was going well, with bright blue skies and stunning scenery, and I was enjoying taking many photos along the way. There are still many wild flowers about and I saw many beautiful deep blue gentians, and these alpine azaleas which make such a pretty show on the mountainside. A cloud came over and then unbelievably a little while later I felt the first of a few raindrops. Next thing it started raining harder and harder, then it was lashing down and there was thunder and lightning...and then if that was not bad enough it started hailing. You can see in the extras what I was wearing, so the hail was quite painful bouncing off my skin, because stupidly we had removed the rain jackets out the backpack yesterday and forgot to put them back in again this morning. Xena hates rain and was not enjoying the hail pelting down on her, she kept trying to find shelter but up on the mountain there wasn't any as we were above the tree line. 

We decided we had to just continue in these conditions to our planned destination where we were going to eat lunch at a mountain restaurant, and when we finally got there we walked in like drowned rats with water just dripping off us, all the other customers inside just looked at us and thought 'stupid idiots, they forgot their rain jackets!' Even my underwear was soaking wet, it was a very uncomfortable lunch sitting in such wet clothes. Luckily I had a warmer top so could remove my wet top and change into that dry one. After lunch we got the funicular down to Davos, then walked to the train station and got the train back to Klosters, and then the bus back up the hill to our home. Xena is a nervous dog but is getting used to trains, buses and the funicular again, which does make some high pitched noises which she finds alarming!

Once home we changed into dry clothes and warmed up. there was more rain this afternoon with more thunder, which is typical of weather in the mountains after a hot day.

Tommy goes to Vienna tomorrow for his week long Machine Learning conference where he has a poster for his paper. He is looking forward to it as he knows many of the other delegates going, including the head of his lab where he will be doing his PhD from November onwards.