CHAPTER 18: Echoes of the Stomach

TRUST THE TROUT

We had emerged from the salt mine with our sense of direction scrambled and our asses still tingling from the world’s oldest wooden slide. Lukas was bleeding from his lip. He wiggled one of his front teeth. It was loose. He pulled it from his mouth and placed it in a folded napkin.

There's something profoundly humbling about being shoved into a canvas smock, sent hurtling down an underground ramp built in 1734, smashing your face into hardwood, and then thanked for your participation like it was all part of a dental plan.

Back above ground, Hallstatt still didn’t feel real. It felt like we were walking through a European dollhouse built by a billionaire who was trying to impress God. The air smelled like wood smoke and glacier runoff. The mountains looked Photoshopped. The swans looked unionized. Even the trash cans were cute.

But we were starving. Spiritually, emotionally, and also in the very real sense that we hadn’t eaten anything since a shared apple strudel in Bad Ischl that now felt like a memory from another life.

So we found a lakeside restaurant. One of those little spaces wedged against the water, with creaky floors, sunburnt picnic tables, and the quiet confidence of a place that knows you’ll order the trout because there’s nothing else that makes sense.