8th – 9th June, 2016

Oh dear it is catch-up time again, so I will get on with it. Well, the weather we had in Salzburg proved to be somewhat transitory and Wednesday and Thursday were wet and very overcast, so we decided to stay in and use the gym, play some table tennis and pool and generally slob out. They have a reasonably good DVD collection, so we entertained ourselves! I am sure that many of you have been wondering where we are with the Great Yahtzee Competition between Val and myself. Well, i managed to open up a 10 game lead, but Val has come back strongly and we are currently level on 124 games apiece. More updates soon!

10th June, 2016

The weather was lovely today, so we made the 1 hour drive to climb up one of the best waterfalls I have ever seen (OK, not as good as the Lower Falls in Yellowstone, but still very impressive). It is called the Krimmler Wasserfalle near the town of Krimml. There is a walkway you can walk up alongside it and so off we set having visited the bottom of the falls first. It starts at 1070 metres above sea level and the top of the falls is at 1486 metres – so a stiff walk! Really well worth it though, as I hope the photos show. Unfortunately I am now walking like John Wayne after a particularly hard day in the saddle! Standing is fine and sitting is good, but everything in between is impossible.

A wonderful day out and it was not over yet as we decided to take ourselves out for dinner at a local restaurant for a bit of Austrian fare. I found what looked like a good candidate on Tripadvisor, only 15 minutes away. Unfortunately our usually very reliable lady on our Satnav failed us this time and it proved almost impossible to find. We made it eventually, about an hour late (it had become a point of determined honour to find it by this time – if only to apologise to the restaurant!). Luckily for us they were fine with it and we had a really excellent meal. The centrepiece, literally, was the ‘BBQ Hat’ or Hut Essen. I thought it might be a traditional Austrian dish or method of cooking, but on brief further research it seems it might be a speciality of this particular restaurant. o

11th June, 2016

Well, it was now time for the next leg of our journey round Europe and we said our goodbyes to Austria. It is a great country to visit – VERY neat and tidy with lovely, solid alpine housing, good roads and fantastic scenery at least in the part we were in. They are VERY keen on speed cameras and I was constantly checking how fast we were going as the speed limit changes rather frequently. One minute you are in an 80kmh zone, then 50, then back to 80, then 100, quickly back to 80, then 50 and so on. It is amazing I did not hit something whilst checking my speed! Still, I suspect it works.

I am so late with this blog, I am going to post it now and then start the next one – including our drive out of Austria. Speak soon!