We weren't supposed to be seeing the town of Feldkirch on our trip to Austria, but it somehow turned out that way. Feldkirch is a few miles from Lichtenstein and a few more miles will take you to Switzerland. The people are lovely, if rather difficult (even for Birgit) to understand. Actually our holiday was supposed to be in the beautiful skiing village of Lech, high up in the Arlberg region of the Alps. And although we got there, Ronja had been getting hotter and hotter the whole way, and a trip to the doctor was hastily followed by a taxi ride down the mountain to the nearest hospital in Feldkirch. The reason was that he feared she had a recurrence of an infection which shouldn't really come back. And he was right. Considering much of her time was spent on a drip making moving around more or less impossible, she seemed to enjoy being there well enough. Except for when anyone in a white coat came by.
The next day, we decided that to begin with Birgit would stick around and I would go back to Lech. I'd had a look at a map before I left and thought I would figure out how to get back to the centre of town and my goal: the train station. I was in a rush to get a train and came to the rather illogical decision that walking would be faster than waiting for a bus. And unfortunately (for me) I'd left the internet sim card with Birgit and didn't think to consider that the map would actually still be in the iPhone even without a connection. After a very scenic tour resulting (I think) from coming down the wrong side of the hill, I did think to look at the map on the phone, but then the GPS had a lot of trouble getting started, either because it was cloudy or because it couldn't use the phone masts to help it out. Shortly after I finally swallowed my pride and asked someone where the train station was, it started working. A few photos and videos of Ronja's hospital stay as well as my wander through Feldkirch (unfortunately I was too stressed to take photos beforehand, but you can get a flavour of the most interesting part
here) are below.
Despite being rather ill and the time somewhere around midnight, Ronja still had enough energy to get very excited about where we had to wait while they got things ready for us: the play room!
On the streets of Feldkirch
Finally!
Being in hospital's not all bad. And there's time to catch up on the news...
And the food (or at least the drinks) aren't bad either
But eventually it was time (for Ronja too!) to leave, we took the bus to the station and we had enough time waiting for the train for Ronja to get a snack from the bakery. There were a couple of English travellers fascinated by the painted eggs (for Easter)...