Closer to heaven, or closer to cliché?

Kirstin Vanlierde
Jul 28, 2017 · 4 min read

Mountains (and cows) for all

© KV —Gleirsch-Hall peak seen from Tulfes (Austria)

I’ve written it before during these travel blogs over the last two weeks: I love mountains. Their shapes, the way the light will catch them in ever different ways, their vast presence. I also love the atmosphere they evoke, their raw sense of physical, natural beauty paired with a sense of spiritual tangibility. No place on earth to be closer to the heavens I guess.

When I sat on the top of Rocca Calascio, musing that I wanted to live in the mountains, my husband frowned. I’m not exactly the world’s most sportive person, and climbing a moderate hill is already considered endurance training by my asthmatic lungs. But my longing wasn’t about becoming the world’s best mountain goat or hiker. Sitting there, I could almost imagine myself spreading huge wings and taking off across the skies for real.

© KV — View from Rocca Calascio

This lovely trip of ours has been a run-in with the most diverse of situations, so inevitable we had to run into some mountain-related silliness as well.

After a night in which we didn’t sleep too well and a long, intensive drive along lorry-packed highways to cross the Brenner pass into Austria, we arrived at our lodging for the night, a small village built up against a slope above Innsbruck. The view we had of the Gleirsch-Hall mountain range there was stunning.

© KV — Gleirsch-Hall peaks seen from Tulfes (Austria)

We decided to go for a pleasant stroll. Now, you need to know — as I have learned over the years — that when my dear husband is tired, his sense of quality humor and taste both take a dive.

So we were joking about Alp clichés, and he insisted on taking a picture of me with some very cliché elements in it: a roadside chapel with roses and the mountains as a backdrop.

Next he wanted to make that other cliché Alps picture: a cow (with cowbell) grazing peacefully with (you’ve guessed it) mountains for a backdrop.

Of course cell phones, even the ones that can produce pretty decent pictures nowadays, can’t magic very distant cows any closer for a decent photograph, so that attempt of his didn’t work out.

Loving wife, present on the scene, decided to humor her husband by making the picture for him.

With a kiss and some more sniggering we started our stroll back to the hotel.

We unexpectedly ran into some more cows, though, on a very small orchard pasture in the center of the village. One of them, mewing loudly, showed a special interest for those strange people walking by.

That’s the moment you have to keep your distance and be grateful for the wonderful telelens your husband gave you as a birthday present. It allows for photographs he would never have allowed you to take if he knew you were making them…

So we both got what we wanted that afternoon: he got his cow cliché, and I got a real picture.

It only seemed fitting to finish this series with a last tribute. Then, stuffed on clichés, we made for the hotel for some actual supper.

© KV — Christophe’s cow

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Kirstin Vanlierde

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A songbird aiming to add its song to the endless music playing throughout the universe.

The Story Hall

A gathering place for stories to be told, read and appreciated.

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