SPRING IN MY SADDLE

Well I just love spring!  Maybe after seeing snow for the past 5 months (this includes my little trip to the UK at Easter, when it snowed too!!!) I feel ready to see the grass and flowers again.

It's marvelous to have light mornings and being woken by the dawn chorus of birds tweeting in the trees nearby, it inspires you to get out of bed and get cracking.  Something that my fellow Austrian friends find easy all year round, not just in the spring, as life over here starts early, school begins at 7.15 in the senior school or 7.45 in the juniors! Plus they have had breakfast, cleared up and still have time to walk to school!  I guess I am not really a morning person, but in the spring I feel more inspired to get up and do.

Spring riding is the best!  Catching the first glimpse of wild flowers poking through, one minute they are not there and the next they are, like magic they just appear!  The morning sun glistening through the trees in the forest where I ride, making fabulous shadows below.  Plus the freedom of being able to ride in a zippy rather than ski jacket and sometimes without my riding  hat, so that I can feel the breeze in my hair, makes it even more special.

There is the lovely sound of trickling of water as it melts from the mountain tops and runs below and turns the grass greener and greener.  Farmers are out in force, spreading muck on the land so that they can make hay later in the year and then letting out their animals who have been indoors the whole winter to enjoy their new found freedom and taste the fresh lush, green grass.  New-born lambs play in groups, springing and jumping on their tiny unstable legs whilst their mothers eat greedily from the land.

My beloved horse, Dan, also loves the spring, I can feel his enthusiasm as we venture out, and at last his long, thick winter coat is nearly out and underneath is the soft, short new growth, it too glistens in the daylight.

I have put all our ski clothes away and piles of winter boots, until next year and instead got out the garden furniture and cushions, filled my window boxes with lovely plants and most exciting of all, I can hang my washing on the line again, and enjoy that fabulous smell of freshly laundered bedding.

The town of St Anton, where we live was only weeks ago full of holiday makers and skiers, the place was alive with music, bars and restaurants full to the brim and now its like a ghost town or Geisterstadt as the locals would say!  Now everything is closed, everywhere has been cleaned and there is an air of relaxation around, the locals have time for themselves and everywhere you go you meet someone you know rather than a stranger/holiday maker.  It's like two different worlds.  So completely different and yet in exactly the same town.

Spring in the mountains is like stepping into the movie The Sound Of Music.... The Hills are Alive.....

I DIDN'T PLAN THIS EITHER!!!!

It wasn't planned, it just happened!
Don't you just love the way things sometimes just happen without you seeing it coming or planning it?
This is exactly what happened to me in February.

I decided one sunny morning to drive out of St Anton into another town around the mountain, purely to see something different and maybe have a coffee and explore this other rather chic ski resort, which shares the same lift pass as us.
I ordered a delicious cafe latte in the cutest little cafe, serving their coffees in pastel coloured cups and saucers, whilst customers in ski boots and others in fur coats, bobbed in for snacks and drinks.  I am rather fascinated by cafes, and love people watching and checking out the different styles and layouts of the cafes themselves!

I have always dreamed of one day having my own cafe with little shop accompanying it, selling all sorts of gorgeous knick-knacks and useless objects that you don't need but just have to have!  I can visualize it perfectly, but who knows if this will ever come to fruition?

As I headed back, dreaming of my cafe/shop lifestyle, I noticed a lovely new boutique all white and shiny, somewhere I had not been before, it must be new!!  Of course I went in to explore.  It was lovely  inside, it was new too, and before long I was chatting away with the owner, you know about the usual stuff.. .. How we ended up living here, how difficult it is to learn german when you are older and not going to school daily, how I miss working and how I have become a full time mother and housewife, and how I had decided to drive to this delightful little town for a coffee and look around for no other reason than that.
It always puzzles people, myself too actually, how and why we came to live in the Alps, and they are even more puzzled when they find out that my husband is English too and that I was not a chalet girl who married a local!  I do struggle at times to explain how we actually did come to live here, when we didn't ever actually plan to live in Austria full time, and at times I revel in the bohemian feeling of just going with the flow and ending up here.
I sometimes think that people must think we are escaping from something or running away from something sinister in our past.

Anyway before I knew it, I had purchased a fabulous new dark green parka coat and also I had got myself a JOB!!!!!!!

So there it is, without even so much as a plan or thought, I have myself a part time job working in a lovely, cool and chic boutique in the mountains!
The perfect way to practice my dreadful german, to get my fix of fashion, to meet new people, to display and sell things to others, to play shop and run it as my own and best of all to get dressed up in nice clothes rather than ski/riding clothes and to swap my Ugg boots for something rather nicer on my feet!!

And do you know what?  I love it!