Day 3 – from the Rangersdorfer Hütte to Stall

Today we woke to birds and cows only. The air was great up here and there was nobody else around. The view from our balcony was incredible: 

Our landlady from yesterday told us that there were two ladies a few days ago who didn’t want to sleep all alone in the hut. Honestly, wtf? It’s so awesome up here so if you’re in the region do plan a stay at the Rangersdorfer Hütte!

After breakfast which the landlady prepared for us yesterday we did some geocaching since the tour for today was very moderate and short. The whole region up here was so beautiful, so quiet and we enjoyed it very much.

At 10 o’clock we finally left with a sad eye. We took some pictures at the Alpe Adria Trail information point and off we went.

Man, putting the backpack up again was the hardest part! Our hips hurt and the first 2 kilometres felt awful. What’s worse is that I got some small blisters from yesterday’s path of horror which didn’t feel too good either, even with Compeed blister plasters on it. 😒

But even with these little pains the first part of this stage was simply beautiful: along the gorgeous alpine pasture overlooking mountains like the dolomites. Adorable!

Soon the path led down the forest again, at first quite comfortable and we had a short break in the forest.

But too soon it got very steep. And suddenly the official AAT GPS track was totally different to the AAT marks along the road. We decided to follow these markings but then suddenly there were none. So we trusted our GPS navigation system and found our own path back to the official track.

The rest of the path was quite unexciting, steep down through some rough, overgrown vegetation which seemed like the designer of the AAT just wanted to find a fast way down, no matter what.

We were quite happy when we got to our accomodation at 1 o’clock p.m., the Pension Pichlerhof. It’s a small guesthouse in Latzendorf, 3km from Stall itself.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t get anything to eat here but the landlady offered to take us to Stall to get something to eat.

First we bought some food at the only local supermarket in Stall, and then we went to the restaurant Dorfschenke for lunch. The nice innkeeper told us that the real set menu will not served before 7 p.m. but we were too hungry to wait so she offered to make us toast and salad. When we finished she told us that the fennel soup just got ready if we needed more food. We really must have looked hungry!  😂 Of course, we also ate the soup. Afterwards, the chef himself took us back to the Pension Pichlerhof. We silently regretted not having stayed at the Dorfschenke for the night, nearer to our way for tomorrow and food available everytime…

Overall, Stall is not very exciting and Latzendorf even less. But maybe we are spoilt from the past three days.

Some figures for today:

• 9,7km
• 100m up
• 970m down
• Hiking time: 2h 14m