Austria’s mountain resort region of Zell am See: Eurotrip Day 03
This panorama of the lake was taken from the grassy park area at the end of the shopping street. I find it magical that photoshop can find a way to seemingly line up water ripples from 8 separate photos taken at different times.
A little farther down the main drag there is a sort of clubhouse/restaurant overlooking a grass field and swimming pool. This place is serene.
Eventually I turned around and walked back to my hotel, to get some water and regroup.
All of the fancy pants hotels on the shopping street were way expensive, and the one I settled for sadly had no internet. And by no internet I mean literally no internet on the premise for any cost. Consequently, the next few days were some of my most productive 😀
I just noticed while writing this that in the photo above the wire that holds up that wreath thing spanning the street doesn’t line up right in the panorama… too late to fix it now :/
(…and apparently the smiley plugin I installed is lacking in the :/ department)
I decided to take the aerial tramway to the top of Mt Schmittenhöhe, which cost about 50$ but was worth every penny.
Both pictures were taken through the tram’s window, but the one below had a more egregious reflection. Perhaps I should invest in a CPL filter or something.
Also, speaking of trams, most people I see getting onto them make a huge fucking blunder of a mistake. The best place to be on a tram is the BACK window, always. It seems blindingly obvious and yet every time I get on a tram I always see people sort of naturally spread out around the edges instead of making a beeline for the back like a smart person.
Anyway here is what you see when you walk out onto the terrace.
Later in the day I had lunch at the upper restaurant.
I can’t imagine how epic it would be to go skiing in this region. I would surely love to come back in the wintertime to find out though!
Here is a picture of the map sign showing all the ski runs and lifts. Here is the pdf version from the mountain’s website.
And here’s the money shot right here. This was the hardest panorama to make, and took 40 or so pictures.
Might I humbly point out that the same picture on the mountain’s official homepage http://www.schmitten.at/ looks like muddy shit and they should have hired me instead :).
/justbeingawesome
This next video I took shows some paragliders taking off, which is cool. A bunch of people gathered around to watch and it really is a fun sight to see. This inspired me to go paragliding, which I did in fact do the next day from this very spot. That event will be covered in my next blog posting.
This might be my favorite non-panoramic photo from the whole day.
Hot damn do I wanna go skiing here! After taking this shot I walked down the path on the right towards the ski lift top station to check out the views on other side of the mountain.
