Oberstdorf and Austria, 4 June

The weather broke in the night with thunder and heavy rain, and a gust of wind blew or dustbin out the door and broke it. Oh well...  They are not expensive.

We had 346 kilometres to drive, but German motorways on a Sunday are pretty much lorry-free, and it was far cooler than it has been - almost unpleasantly so, in fact. The first 30km or so was on the B8, and then just before Regensburg we joined the A3 and stayed on it more or less all the way. We are parked up in a car park we have been to before, just outside Hanau; I only vaguely remember it and the SW doesn't remember being under the flight path to Frankfurt airport!

 

He went out for a long walk last night, including to a confiserie we had passed that was open to buy our Pentecost cheesecake, which we had for supper pudding.

Oberstdorf and Austria, 3 June

So we started the long homeward trek today. The worst thing about the van is it doesn't have air-conditioning, and today was very hot. Fine for me, I could, and did sleep much of the time, but the SW has to drive.

We went out to Schonbrunn before setting off, just to have a quick look at it, and we also did some shopping and got diesel.

  We went on the motorway as far as Passau, stopping a couple of times to stretch and once to eat ice cream, and then drive along the Danube to our parking space in the middle of nowhere!  Very peaceful, except for an elderly German gentleman who insisted on making friends while I was trying to get supper, but he was rather a sweetie!

Oberstdorf and Austria, 2 June

Yesterday was All About Vienna.  We knew we would have to pace ourselves, so didn't set off until about 9:30, giving the rush hour a chance to get over, too.  The camp site is about 800 metres from the U-Bahn (there is a bus, but only every 30 minutes on weekdays and we had just missed it), and it didn't take long to get into the centre of town, where we wandered through the parks and past the Hofbrunn palace complex (I'm sure you used to be able to walk through it, but we must have been in the wrong part to do that).  And so into the old town where we had coffee, and then walked past the Stefansdom (Mass was being said, so we couldn't really visit it).  We caught a bus to the Naschmarkt, more of a tourist trap than ever, where we had lunch.  We could probably have walked, but I had a blister which was getting sorer by the minute.

Then a visit to an apothecary for blister plasters (oh, the relief!), and a bus to where we could change to a tram.  We wanted Line 1 of the U-Bahn, to take us out to Kagran, where we had been some years ago now to watch friends skating.  The ice rink, of course, is closed for the summer, although they were still advertising their hockey team outside.  There is also a large shopping mall, the Donauzentrum, but it seemed tiny compared to Westfield, and even to Cité Europe, and the ice creams we scored there were not very nice.

We had seen there was a bus that would take us down to "our" U-Bahn station, so we took it, and I regret to say waited 25 minutes to go all of one stop on the next one, which dropped us outside the campsite.  And a nap, a cool shower, a light supper, and a very early bed!  I was very, very tired!

Oberstdorf and Austria, 1 June

Today started off in Graz. We found you could buy a day-ticket for public transport for €5, so we went over to the tram stop and hopped on the nearest tram, only to go off again a couple of stops later to go back and lock the side door of the van! Fortunately either nobody had noticed, or the homeless gentleman with whom we had shared our breakfast had kept an eye on it, as all was well.

Then back into town, this time right up into the centre and beyond, to go up the funicular to the Schloßberg, which was full of school children (all of Graz was, it was some kind of children's day).  So we came back down, after admiring the view,

and walked round the Old Town for a bit, but it was mostly rather Euro-high-Street and very much designed for tourists, so we came away and caught a tram to the central station, had coffee, and then caught a bus back to the P&R.

I did some shopping in the local Lidl, and then we set off for Vienna, stopping to have lunch in the first service area and then later when the SW needed a break. The traffic into the city was dreadful, although the SW says he reckons the M4 is worse.  Perhaps he's right.

We got to the campsite in the end, and very nice it is, too, and near the Métro. We have a full day to explore tomorrow, and I expect we'll make the most of it.

Oberstdorf and Austria, 31 May

The storm continued unabated during the first part of the night - at one point, enormous hailstones landing on the roof made it impossible to hear ourselves speak!  And the last loud bang of thunder was just that: "Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!" like that, before dying away. And so we slept, as the rain gradually petered out, too.

In the morning, it was still a bit cloudy, but we went out to explore the local Schloß on an island in what turned out to be the Traunsee. 

You had to pay to go in, but there were two museums, one about the history of the place, and the other about climbing, and mountain rescue on, the Traunberg. 

After that, it was time to move on so we drove to Graz down a rather hairy motorway with lots of tunnels, which gave the sat nav indigestion!  What slightly annoyed us was that yesterday we had bought our vignette to entitle us to drive on "All the motorways in Austria", as it says on the back, but twice there was a tollbooth where we had to pay again!  Ah well, I suppose they have to pay for the tunnels somehow, but they might have warned us!

Anyway, eventually we got to the place in Graz where we are going to spend the night and found that, as we had been warned might happen, it was full.  It is a Park'n'Ride, so we assumed it would get empty later (it hasn't much, so far), and decided that, because we were within reach of the Slovenian border, we would head down that way and visit the town of Maribor (Mauberg, in old money) before coming back.  

We realised that we would have to buy a vignette for Slovenia, too, and we agreed we had rather "had" motorways for one day, so we came off at Leibnitz (which, alas, was not home to the eponymous biscuit, but was still rather pretty), and then continued on the slower roads to Maribor.

And a slow, and thundery, journey back - had to flash our passports at the frontier - but we found a parking space in the P&R and have parked up for the night.

Oberstdorf and Austria, 30 May

I decided that, as the showers on-site looked really nice - not the swimming pool type you can only really wash your hair in, I would treat myself to one (they were €1 each, and I only had 1 coin) and it would have been perfect had the hot water lasted just 30 seconds longer so I could have rinsed my conditioner out. Not really a problem as, once I was dressed, I could rinse my head in one of the washbasins provided, but even still.....

We used the services and then said a sad farewell to the Achensee, driving down into the Inn valley (stopping first to buy a vignette for the Austrian motorway system), and stopping to shop in a place called Wörgl, and then headed on. It is a function of what was left of Austria after 1919 and the peculiar geography of the valley that it is quicker, when travelling from Innsbruck to Salzburg, to go via Germany​.  We told the Satnav we wanted to stop in Bad Reichenhall for lunch, as we had been to several skating camps there back in the day, and we had a lovely walk remembering former landmarks and discovering new ones.

After lunch we set off again to our overnight stop in Gmunden, but it was so hot and boring motorway that I slept through most of it. The SW went for a short walk when we arrived, but had to come back as there was a thunderstorm going on, which has eased for the moment but was very violent for a while there!

Oberstdorf and Austria, 29 May

The day started badly. The Swan Whisperer woke me by saying he was going for a run, but when I surfaced I found that he had neither made tea nor turned the bathwater on.  Not had he taken his water bottle with him. And then he didn't come back, and wasn't answering his phone......  I was very frightened,  imagining that he had had a heart attack or torn a muscle or something, but when he eventually turned up, it transpired that he had just run round the lake as far as the Dripping Rock and back, which the Chalet School girls may have done every morning, but is not actually practicable in real life.  And his phone, for some reason, was on silent.....

So breakfast was a lot later than I had hoped, but finally we were able to get away and catch a bus into Pertisau, where we visited the slate oil museum. The mining seems all to have been done by one family, so perhaps the poverty EBD describes was real.... Anyway, I then bought some shampoo and conditioner, which I hope will be nice, and some of the original ointment, which I gather never expires, like honey.

After which, we were in just nice time to buy tickets for a round trip on the boats that ply the lake,

which was lovely, and then a sausage in a bun before the bus back to Maurach. We had a wee bit of shopping to do, so did that and spent the next hour enjoying iced coffee in the nearest restaurant.  And just as we got on the bus back to Buchau, it began to rain!

We had hoped to eat in the campsite restaurant this evening, but it was closed, so I made lentil curry, which was very good.  The rain appears to be away, but who knows for how long. Certainly it could do with being cooler - EBD was not wrong when she had the girls go limp in the heat!