Friday 14th September 2012 - Monday 17th September 2012

Friday, and the weather appears to be improving, so we are able to cycle along the cycle track by lakeside into St Gilgen.

St Gilgen turns out to be a picture postcard Austrian Village, very pretty, in fact, on our way there we almost cycle through a filmset by the lake, where they are making a scene from some TV program we will obviously never see, since it is in Austrian!

We have lunch, and sit by the lake in the sun, just enjoying the scenery, and of course, indulge in the hunt for a church, on the assumption we will be here on Sunday.







But, Saturday arrives, and it is dull and raining heavily, this place is really just like the English Lake District!

Beautiful although it is, we decide, if it is raining, we may as well be driving, we head west toward Germany, having decided we will stay at Ubersee (where we stayed on our way East.

Sunday and the sun is shinning, that is better!.

Kathleen peddles off to church, while I laze in the sun.

We meet for coffee and cake at a little cafe in the town, after church. An odd conversation ensues, I think the owner of the cafe must be Italian rather than German, but a mixture of Kathleen's German, and some pidgeon Italian, with much gesturing gets us the coffee and cake we want.

Having stuffed ourselves with cake, good intentions dictate that we must work it off, so we cycle around the countryside,

with of course a "radler stop"

If we are going to come to Germany again, I need to improve my German at least to the mediocre level of my French, at least I can do the essentials, ie order drinks in French!

The end of another great day.

Monday, we cycle to the nearby Cheimsee, my original intention was to cycle all of the way around the lake, but, in reality it turned out to be much bigger than I thought!

So, we settle for doing a small part of it, and very attractive it is too.

Tomorrow, we will be heading toward the Bordensee, but, this stelplatz is a little find, we would definately use this again.

Tuesday 11th September 2012 - Thursday 13th September 2012

We cycle the eight miles, into Vienna, along an excellent cycle track which runs alongside the River Danube and Danube canal.

I am rather disappointed to see, the Danube is not blue, as in the song, but, a rather green/brown colour.

It is true to form for Austria/Germany, well maintained, clean, well signposted, and plenty of "radler" (shandy) stops.

We do the usual sight seeing things, St Stephens Basilica.

Statues, of people we have never heard of, this guy was a Fieldmarshal.

Presumably, a Fieldmarshal who led from the office, since he lived to be 84. "Send another 10,000 forward!, oh, and could you pass the port".

Some nice public gardens, the best part of any city, in my humble opinion.

A rather magnificient, and beautifully maintained Parliament building, well, the politicians always take good care of themselves don't they?








Vienna is another beautiful European City, I am not really a city person, but our European neighbours definately know how to make their cities "people friendly", why can't we do this?

We have had an amazing run of good weather, it is weeks since we saw rain. But, that all comes to an end on Tuesday night, with a thunder storm.

Wednesday, I manage a 12 mile cycle ride along the Danube, out of Vienna, while Kathleen is laid up with the usual "leg problem", ie big red blotches on both legs.

By 16:00 on Wednesday, it is raining again, so the plan is to move on, tomorrow. Kathleen has spent some of her time looking at our route home, and has realised, we are still 1,000 miles (approximately), from Calais.

I suppose we should not complain about a bit of rain, since we have had day after day of glorious sunshine, but, Thursday comes, and it is raining again.

A dismal drive in pouring rain across northern Austria. Not mountainous like the south, not that it would have mattered, visibility is so poor you cannot see the scenery.

We arrive at Birkenstrand Camping am Wolfgangsee, near St  Gilgen, Abersee, another ASCI site.

The site is about 1.5 miles from the village of St Gilgen, on the shore of a lake. It has the potential to be a beautiful place, if it would just stop raining!

It looks very like the Lake District, including the rain!

Tuesday 28/08/2012 – Thursday 30/08/2012

We are soon in Austria and we are cruising along through spectacular scenery.

Armed with our “vignaitte” to travel on their motorways (8Euro for ten days), we can also cover some distance quickly, then, only about 5 miles from our planned stop for the day, we get a puncture.

Damn!.

Fortunately, it is the front, righthand side wheel, so I can get at it on the hard shoulder, without being "on the traffic side".

We get into our fluorescent “safety” vests, Kathleen sets up the warning triangle (the first time we have used any of this stuff) and prepare to change the wheel on the hard shoulder.

Not a pleasant experience with three lanes of traffic speeding past at 70mph plus, less than a metre where I have to lie on the ground to retrieve the spare wheel from under the van.

Needless to say, I do not linger to take photographs of this!

All is completed, without incident, and we travel on to our chosen campsite (Thermal Camping, Bad Waltersdorf).

After we have checked in, an very efficient Austrian lady comes to see us about the tyre.

Kathleen is sceptical about how much she will know about tyres.

The Austrian lady is the model of efficiency, makes a note of all of the tyre markings (size, type, etc), notices it is a Bridgestone (not easy to get I know from past experience), so takes a note of the same information from a Pirelli tyre which is already on the van.

She has quite a nice chest too. Almost worth getting a puncture for.

She phones a garage, they do not have a matching tyre, but, one is ordered, with delivery promised for Thursday, or earlier if possible.
You would have to have seen this to appreciate it, she was just so efficient, all of the above took only five minutes. On her belt she had a little sort of bag, in which to had everything to hand, notepad and pen to note the details, mobile phone to make the call, notepad and pen again to give me a note of the Garage name and address. I am sure Herr Flick ('allo, 'allo) would have loved her.


In the interim, it is no hardship to stay here, the site is excellent, with the kind of spotless and high quality facilities you expect to find in Germany or Austria.

There is a railway line running by the site, but the trains are very infrequent (noisy freight trains when they do pass). Must take care not to call them Germans, they are very particular about ensuring you know they are Austrians.

Wednesday morning, 09:30, we are told, they have our tyre, and we need to go and collect it at 14:30 in a town about twelve miles away. 140Euro, but, we have to have a spare.

A problem emerges, the site, in common with most sites in Germany and Austria, has a “quiet time” between 12:00 and 15:00. The gate is closed, no vehicles can get in or out.
This being Austria, the rules apply to everyone, even a McCaffery, so we have to drive out of the gate before 12:00 and park outside. Kathleen tries her hardest, but, soon grows impatient with waiting. I think she actually lasted until 12:05.

We head for Hapsdorf, looking for Konig Garage.

It is only 12 miles away, and we arrive way too early. They are very obliging however, and give us coffee, while a young man takes away our ruined tyre and returns with a new tyre fitted in a short while. We do a little shopping, and are back at the site by 14:55, with only five minutes to wait until the gate opens.

Now that the tyre problem is fixed, our thoughts turn to our first site in Hungary. We decide to check the distance, using the satnav.

Problem!

Before leaving home, someone (ie me) did not check that the Satnav included maps of Hungary. I reasoned, since they are part of the EU, they are part of Europe and the satnav covers Europe.

But, (and it is not often I admit this), I am wrong, we have no satnav coverage for Hungary.

We have an uptodate Road Atlas which includes Hungary, so Kathleen is going to have to dust off her map reading and navigating skills.

Thursday, we say goodbye to our Austrian tyre expert and head for Hungary.

The first part is easy, we head along the A2 motorway, past the scene of our puncture, and switch to another smaller road which takes us toward the border.

At the border, we have to buy another “vignaitte”, this time to travel on the Hungarian motorways (at least I think it is for the motorways, there only seems to be one!, but there are lots of signs saying you have to buy a “vignaitte”, so, we stop at the border. We are waved on by a sleepy guard, who points to a petrol station about 500 yards down the road.

Kathleen manages the transaction no problem in a mixture of German and English. One slight hiccup, she leaves her glasses behind, but the young man from the petrol station manages to catch us, before we drive off.

We actually manage the rest of the way to Keszthely, Balatontourist Camping Zala (ACSII book) without a single wrong turn.

But, it is not easy navigating in a country with such unpronounceable place names, how about Zalaegerseg or Csabrendek, how on earth do you pronounce them! I have to ask Kathleen to spell the place names out, so I can watch for the signs!

June 11th 2010 - June 13th 2010

Natters - Ferienparadies Natter See - ACSI2010-723 Contd

Friday, another hot and sunny day. Kathleen cannot be talked into cycling along some of the walking and rambling tracks marked on the map given to us by reception when we checked in. Instead, she evades the question by promising to buy Apple Struddle, if we cycle to the village (Natters).

Being a glutton (literally), I am convinced and we cycle to Natters, not far, only about 1.5 miles, and all down hill.

The bad news is, there is nothing there except houses, a church, and (of all things) a shop selling plants. No bar, and the only restaurant is closed. I think I have been conned.

We cycle on, looking for Apple Struddle. We go down a very big hill. This is obviously not wise, since if you go down, you have to come up again. We fail in our search, and now have to cycle back about 3 miles all up hill.

We console ourselves with ice creams bought from the camp shop, then spend some of the afternoon chatting with a very friendly Dutch man, who is our new neighbour, and is keen to talk to everyone. Before talking to us, he had been talking with a French couple, but with little success, since he told us he did not speak French.

In the evening, when it has cooled down a bit, we begin our packing for our departure tomorrow.

Saturday, and we do not have far to go, our destination is a place called Reutte, still in Austria and only about 1 hour away (in theory).

Things go wrong almost immediately, the Tomtom instructs us to turn left at a junction with no left turn, so we have to go straight ahead, this takes us into the centre of Innsbruk, and after what seems like a 100 sets of traffic lights, all on stop of course.

Eventually we are out of the town and heady along an almost empty road, through beautiful scenery. It is too good to last, as we climb a steep hill, we come to a halt in a queue of traffic, . After about 15 minutes of stop start crawling, we come upon the problem, a broken down car.

Once past that problem, we move quite nicely for a while. Not for long. We join another queue, and this is a big one (but we later discover, nothing like as big as the queue comming the other way). Again we crawl stop/start up the hill, this time the problem is a short (not more than 20 meters) of road which has collapsed, and which they are in the process of repairing, so there is one way traffic controlled by traffic lights. We eventually get passed and on our way. The poor people going in the opposite direction are not so lucky, we pass traffic queuing for at least 2km. Then we come to a long tunnel (3 km), they have stopped the traffic in the opposite direction, to prevent queuing in the tunnel, and on the other side there are two lanes of queuing vehicles stretching back another 5km. It is sweltering hot, and many cars are stopped with bonnets up, having overheated. Goodness knows how long it is going to take for that lot to clear, and all because of a 20 metre stretch of road works! 

Reutte - Camping Reutte - ACSI2010-736

We arrive at around 12:00, having taken 2.5hours to do a 1hr journey. The site is excellent, and right on the edge of Reutte, you could walk into town if you wished.

 A little exploring on the bicycles and we have found the church for tomorrow, and topped up our wine supply from a Lidl.

We have not had rain for weeks now, the last time was in Spain I think, but it looks like today may be the day. Kathleen takes the opportunity to do the hair care thing, and by evening we have a full scale thunderstorm.

Sunday, it is dry but a bit cloudy, with rain threatening. We do the church run, without getting wet, then we sit eating strawberries and cream, while searching the internet for the places to see on the "Romantic Route", through Germany.

Sorry, came across this while searching on the Internet and could not resist including it, it is so funny, except, it has the ring of truth about it!

June 9th 2010 - 10th June 2010

Peschiera del Garda – Bella Italia – ACSI2010-1815 continued

Today we leave Lake Garda, and head north to Austria.

We decide to take a chance on the "ordinary" roads, rather than take the motorway, since generally speaking we find the motorway boring.

The scenery is spectactular as we head north into the Dolomites, this is our view when we stop for lunch en-route to the Brenner Pass.

(sorry if this photo is side ways, don't know why that is happening!, you will just have to turn your computer on its side).

Brenner Pass an anti climax, from the Italian side, as you can see, empty road, and nothing dramatic in terms of climbing or twisting roads,

but the scenery compensates for it I suppose, it is absolutely stunning. It may be more exciting going south from Austria into Italy, we will have to try it sometime.











We have lots of problems finding the campsite, including being directed (by the Tomtom) up a couple of very narrow and steep roads, one of which we had to reverse out of, since it was too narrow to turn around.

We discovered the problem. We usually input the map co-ordinates (if we have them) to the Tomtom, rather than the postcode. Well you may of may not know, map co-ordinates are commonly quoted in three different formats. Without going into all of the details, the Tomtom had been set (by somebody), to a different format to that in our ACSI campsite book. The result was it it was trying to take us to somewhere near where we wanted to go, but not actually where we wanted to go. How this happened is a mystery, it was OK last time we used it. I know I have not touched the Tomtom for days, and naturally Kathleen did not do it, so we must have a third party travelling with us.

Natters - Ferienparadies Natter See - ACSI2010-723

We find it in the end, relying on good old fashioned signposts, you know the way people did before satnavs!

The site is excellent, well worth the trouble we had finding it! The facilities are palatial and just look at the view from our window!

These Austrian's are so organised, everything is spotlessly clean, and works exacltly as you would expect.

The washing up sinks have so much stainless steel they could be in an operating theatre, and after watching the half hearted squirting of a hose as a cleaning exercise in southern Europe, watching the young Austrian girl doing the cleaning with a scrubbing brush is a revelation.

Thursday, we go to Innsbruk.

I am game to try cycling there (are you surprised?), since it is only about 4 miles, but Kathleen is not up for it, so we get the bus.

This involves a bus from the site, to the village of Natters, where we must get another bus to Innsbruk.

Needless to say it all goes smoothly and the bus times are set such that there is no waiting time on the way there, and only five minutes on the way back.

Unfortunately they do not accept UK pensioners bus passes, so we have to pay 9.20Euro return for the two of us.

Innsbruk is quite a beautiful place. Kathleen has been here before, in her youth, so some places she remembered from then (like the Golden Roof, shown above, on its side for some reason).

We enjoy strolling the streets so much, we stay for lunch, and have an "Austrian" lunch of Vienasnitchel, and Bratwurst (think that is how you spell it!), plus of course a couple of beers.

There are impressive buildings (right way up in real life, damned computers), even in the smallest alleys.

Plus, inevitably a triumphal arch, every city in Europe must have one, it would appear.

and of course, the usual collection of churches.

Innsbruk, is not as impressive as Salzberg, in my humble opinion, but it is still a pleasant way to spend a day.