Today we travelled to Austria, and the first tourist store we came to had the old road sign - the yellow triangle with the picture of a kangaroo and the wording no kangaroos here! The Austrians are obviously sick of being confused with Australians.
The trip today was just amazing, we travelled through the most amazing countryside. Such beautiful and breathtaking views of quaint little villages nestled into rolling grren hills on the sides of the most extraordinary mountains.
The bus wound its way from Venice through the Dolomite Ranges of Italy. Now in Australia, we are very lazy and just travel around the mountains and up and down the mountains in Europe you travel through the mountains. I always thought the Domain and Burnley tunnels were fantastic feats of modern engineering, but they have nothing on the tunnels in Europe. We went through so many I lost count and at one stage we went through a tunnel 14 kms long. Just amazing! The longest tunnel is in Switzerland and is 18km long.
To break our journey and because we had to we went through the fourth smallest country in the world, Lichtenstein, only beaten by the Vatican, Monaco and San Marino. A really quaint little place, where they actually stamp your passport for you, but only if you pay two euro. At this stage according to my passport I have only been to Lichtenstein, because no one stamps passports in Europe any more, and in most cases at boarder crossings they don´t even stop your car or bus. According to our tour guide the boarder police are just too lazy.
We arrived safely in Innsbruk and immediately went on a tour or Swarovsky Crystal, and of course I had to buy a couple of pieces of jewellery. We wandered around the city and did some shopping before going to our Hotel. It was so gorgeous, a typical little Austrian Hotel, very quaint, with a bar, and laundry, and all the facilities you could ask for and clean cute rooms.
We had a typical dinner of Weiner Schnitzel and strudel, of course, but it was very nice. Gerard tried to catch up with his friend Alex from Austria, but he was 80kms away and it was his birthday and they had friends coming over, so that was a bit of bad luck, but at least Gerard has his contact details now.
Our next trip is onto Lucerne.
