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”.