Skip to main content

Through Austria




Thur 14th Sept.




With confidence restored in our EP80-90 security, we had a late and soggy start and headed uphill into Austria and went to Kitzbuhel. It’s a beautiful place and we remember it fondly, as it featured each year on TV. Ski Sunday was a weekly tea-time staple and we watched the annual Kitzbuhel downhill on the dramatic Hahnenkamm.

Now we are late summer tourists, just wandering around and also wondering why the café dwellers only seem to be drinking coffee and eating ice cream at lunchtime. We didn’t find anywhere suitable for our lunch.







We eventually drove on south, passing an increasing number of old, classic tractors, which seemed to be heading for a meet at a nearby town. The campsite there was already bursting at the seams with them.

We had a picnic of UK sourced items, somewhere on the road towards the Grossglockner pass. We arrived at the toll booths with the clouds clearing enough to warrant the €40 fee and proceeded uphill. What a drive it is; we had forgotten the north side (drove it in 2015), as downhill is somewhat easier than up.




Anyway up we drove, the tight, steep hairpins are endless and the mists made for dramatic views but at the top (2,500m) it was cold (6C), which is probably still warmer than Ben Nevis.






Then it was down the south side, remembering to keep off the brakes as much as possible. Low range was just too slow, so I carefully went down in  2nd or 3rd but only braked infrequently and quite hard when I did. At one point I had a German campervan behind, so I let him pass and we watched the brake lights and smelt the result but they did get down without boiling the fluid.

We were slowed by cows being walked down the road and by one of the Hochalpenstrasse workers clearing all the cow poo immediately. He parked his van in the middle and wouldn’t let us pass.



Then, at the bottom, we stopped in a picture perfect village of Heiligenblut and stayed at the beautiful campsite Nationalpark-camping Grossglockner (click here for the website) run by Fam. J. Fleissner.

Here we splashed out on a meal in der Chef’s restaurant and enjoyed Josef’s chat about life and everything.







As Brits he seemed to direct us to chose Weiner Schnizel and was ready with a double helping, which along with local wine, beer and a dry mouth-cleansing Vermouth on the house, went down a treat.

He charges handsomely for the campsite (€36.30 including €2.15 each visitor tax) but you can’t grumble because of the view.

He was ready to provide a rant about energy costs; all it needed was an innocuous comment from me and he was away! “The EU energy pool is a pile of shit” was the opener and it got worse, ending with a huge rant about economic migrants. Eventually I was able to drag myself away.

The next morning he wasn’t surprised to hear that we were en-route for Greece “Crazy British go everywhere”.


Comments

Phil said…
Amazing view drinking dry vermouth.Very nice!
Mark M. said…
Steep roads and steep tolls!!!
Those views look great.

Popular posts from this blog

On y va

Hooray. We are off. The ferry was booked a few weeks ago and the pressure was then on to get all sorts of jobs finished on the house and Landy. Major cosmetic work was to cover the grey front doors with paint that matches the rest of the vehicle. On the engine a coolant leak had developed behind the water pump and so the P gasket and adjacent core plug were renewed. Also a cheapy head unit from those Chinese people replaced the old Sony fm radio. Now we have opened up the wonders of Car Play and all that comes with it. Finally the 9th gen iPad with WiFi became a 9th gen iPad with WiFi and ‘cellular’. This means we can use OsmAnd Maps which need no data and get their gps position off the ‘cellular’ chip in the iPad. More on this useful map in subsequent posts. We headed towards Portsmouth for a mid morning ferry via our old neighbours in S-I-V. There we had a great few hours updating each about our families and then proceeded to save the NHS, the country and the world too. I mean why no...

Burgundy

We thought that after the descent from Col du Galibier, we would be done with cols. They are brilliant to drive but hard work. The narrower the road the harder it is, especially at hairpins. These are almost always steep and so the vehicle speed and engine revs need to be correct before the turn. If it’s a right hand bend then the driving line is obviously on the right part of the corner which is always the steepest. It’s all about teamwork, especially as those bikers love the roads and like to be close to the middle. A Land Rover 110 needs a wide turning circle and so we have to look out sideways and either up above or down below to see what’s coming. After Galibier the road finally descends to the ski area of Valloire and on to Col du Telègraphe, which from the south isn’t much but those ascending from the north will feel the height gain. Then down to the Maurienne valley and we think we are done with hills. However there’s one last surprise as we turn right off the motorway route to...

Onwards

You can’t visit a classic car enthusiast without admiring their car and we got our timing right, as it was the monthly club meet on Sunday. This was held at the Hippodrome in Maisons Laffitte, so it was just up the road. The definition of ‘classic’ here is 30 years and so many of the vehicles there looked very familiar to us 😳. TR5 and TR6, MGB, RR, BMW, Maserati, of course the Jensen Interceptor that our host drives, 2CV, Caterham 7, a beautiful Austin Healy 3 litre and then this… This is identical to mine, a Fiat 850 Sport Coupé, that I owned from 1978-81. Seeing it, brought back memories of welding, brazing, stripped driveshaft splines, clutch on the M1 and many miles of amazing touring. We drove around France on a camping road trip for all of September 1978 and the following year did the Ardennes for a month too. Here’s Nige’s Jensen… Maisons Laffitte is a very nice area to the west of Paris centre. The mansion is now owned by a trust I think and is a beautiful building. All we ne...