River cruise (18th September)

We wake up to a slightly improved outlook, the view out the window definitely gives us a good chance of predicting the showers. We fill the morning by ringing John and Margaret at 10am followed by exploring the castle gardens, which includes a revolving theatre, a pond and an oak tree that we can each fit into! On our way out, one of the brown bears is hiding, but we enjoy seeing the other two feeding (on a very weird vegetarian diet). We look after dietary requirements by stopping at the Coop and getting a couple of bottles of Sprite and some Peach Schnapps to spice it up for our afternoon adventure. By the time we make it to the hostel, the courtyard has been taken over by table tennis playing pirates. Our numbers grow to bursting point and we have to abandon ship into the lifeboats... three inflatable rafts set aside by the hostel for the infamous "river pub crawl". SO many people rave about CK -and pretty much everyone that does, does so because of this one activity. We are joined by a forth boat of people we know who have hired their own raft further upstream. They have already been on the water for half an hour and within 50m of passing us, they capsize on a rock, cut up one crewman's foot, lose 12 beers, a Swiss Swiss army knife, a camera and basically make us all second guess how sensible this 5 hour cruise will be! Don't worry mum - I can tell you now that the only person that went overboard on our boat for the rest of the trip was "Trophy" Dani, who was stolen by force by another pirate boat. Basically it's a pub crawl, except that instead of crawling from pub to pub you float down the river and stop at little riverside bars. I think we missed the first one (no neon signs to direct you in the wilderness) but we made up for it with the 25 crown beers at the next one! It's surreal to jump out of the boat, order a beer, get a sausage cooked for you, then sit beside the campfire to enjoy it. Shona even got a wine, not from a bottle, but from a 25l plastic catering container, just like the ones for the raro at school camp! It's pretty hard to explain how cool this cruise is - and we have to remind ourselves we didn't even do it in peak season when all 6 bars are open and the weather is so hot that you WANT to jump in. Along the side of the river there are also numerous apple trees, which provide great ammunition for the canons (Mike). Mike was also named "Cap'in" (probably because he started calling directions when paddling was required to avoid the bank) which meant that Shona became "First Lady". She lived up to the name by being the only person that didn't need a natural pit stop, but only because a local from a closed bar ran back to the house to get the key just for her! Chris was "The rudder", Ange was "the Moon leader", James was "bug control" and Matt was "dead weight". Basically a totally hilarious afternoon - and the scenery was appreciated as well! We were stoked when we heard that some of the people on the other boats wished they were on ours... and noticed that the pirate in the budgie smugglers wasn't in the best state by the end of the trip! For dinner we'd been told by Chad, Karine, Ben and Lauren that the Bavarian feast at 2 Maries was worth a look. It was! We had the chicken, with sauerkraut, dumplings, grated potato fritter with herbs, roast potatoes, steamed meat, peas and salad. Luckily -the one plate had heaps of food so we didn't need to fight over anything (and we had favourites as well).