Not Before Time

Finally, we’ve got the laptop working again so we’ve been able to update with lots of photos – don’t forget to send us your comments!

We arrived into Vienna mid afternoon and finally found our hotel after driving around Vienna’s one way streets for a while.  We booked the hotel on the internet, and it’s sometimes the reality is a bit different from what the website might indicate.  However this hotel is really nice with a lounge room, kitchenette, bedroom and bathroom and the location is perfect – right in the heart of the inner city within walking distance to all the restaurants, shops, museums, galleries and taverns of course.

We had dinner the first night at a Griechenbeisl – a restaurant which is the oldest building in Vienna.  The date on the building is 1449.  The building was originally a house which was built on Roman foundations, but has operated as an inn in one form or another since 1500.  The inside is full of little rooms with vaulted ceilings, and  the wall of one of the rooms is covered with signatures from famous people who patronized the inn over the years, including Mozart, Beethoven, Mark Twain, and Bismark.  The restaurant specializes in Viennese food and our dinner was very good.  We spent the next two days walking it off!

The second night we went to a dinner/show on one of the sightseeing tours and it was really good fun.  The show was full of Strauss music with lots of singing and dancing by performers wearing period costume. 

We’ve seen lots of beautiful cities and towns while we’ve been traveling, but Vienna has probably the most beautiful buildings we’ve seen anywhere.  Again, while it’s busy, there aren’t the crowds we expected and it’s very easy to move around.  The temperature is higher here than in the countryside too – average at the moment is around 35 deg C and the humidity is very high.

Tomorrow we are heading off to the Czech Republic where we will be spending the next 3 nights in Prague.

We originally weren’t going into Switzerland at on this trip, but then we decided that we really wanted to see Zurich and it’s so close to the Austrrian/Italian borders we decided it was worth the drive into Switzerland before we headed further east into Austria.

We crossed the border into Switzerland early the following morning and arrived in Zurich mid afternoon.  We should have gotten there a lot sooner than that, as Zurich is only about 2 hours from Braz, but we tend to take the scenic routes, sometimes deliberately!  (Signposting in Europe is interesting -. We’ve learned to allow lots of extra time when travelling).

Zurich is a compact and very beautiful city and we spent the next couple of days walking all over the city, drinking some great beer and eating yummy food (cheese fondue, rosti, sausages)  However, However, Zurich is a very expensive city, so budget wise, after a couple of days it was time to move on..

We spent the next couple of days driving through southern Germany (Bavaria) heading back to Austria..  It’s very pretty countryside and worth the extra couple days it took us.

Arriverderci Italy

This next morning the rain had stopped and we drove for a couple of hours through the beautiful  Italian alps before crossing  the Brennar Pass into Austria – and (this was a great shock to the system!) from Italy’s 40 degree temperature into Austria’s 20 degrees!

We’ve been driving through some of the most awesome scenery – picture postcard beautiful – mountains (some with snow still on them); chalets with their window boxes full of geraniums and summer annuals, and cows wearing their cowbells.  The only bad part (for me at least) was that the further into the alps we went, the colder it got, with the temperature falling to 13 deg C.  You tend to feel a bit silly wearing shorts, tops and thongs when everyone else is wearing jackets and long pants etc.  We reached Innsbruck by mid afternoon and spent a few hours there.  The sun was out and it was a bit warmer which was good.  Innsbruck is a lovely city, surrounded by the alps.

One thing about driving through the alps is that you go through lots of tunnels.  I’d read about the tunnels, but I hadn’t realized there were so many of them.  Generally they vary in size from 1km – 5kms (and they have little pictures along the length of the tunnel showing a stick figure running and some flames, and a distance is marked indicating how far it is to the nearest exit in the event of an emergency, which is very comforting).  However, there is a new tunnel through the Alberg Pass and it’s  the tunnel, the mother of them all! – 14kms long (well 13.9 to be exact) and there are exits at either end, and only one emergency exit about 3km from one entrance!  There’s no other emergency exit along the length of the tunnel, but, there are lots of pictures showing how far it is to the entrances in the event of an emergency.  Neither of us are claustrophobic, but we were both glad to get out of that tunnel.

We stopped the night in a little village called Braz staying in a little gueshouse which is typically Austrian Tyrol chalet style – very pretty with its flower baskets, wood trim, lovely gardens.  Thomas, our host was a nice man and the guesthouse had been run by his family for over 100 years.

We spent a full day in Venice and  it’s such a beautiful city with its canals, bridges and of course the gondolas, very different to anywhere else we had seen.  This is also where the crowds were –  probably the most we had seen anywhere in Italy,  but it still wasn’t overly crowded and it was easy to move around.  There are some really nice restaurants in Venice, but it’s very expensive compared to other areas in Italy.  For example, just about everywhere in Italy you can buy an espresso coffee for roughly 85 cents to 1 Euro – in Venice it averaged 4 Euro’s!  That’s probably why we didn’t see any Italians eating there – only tourists!

After leaving Venice we drove for another couple of hours before stopping for the night.  And just in time too  – 5 minutes later a huge storm swept in which lasted all night.