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!