On Monday I flew from Madrid to Munich and met up with Mum and Dad. They have been travelling through Alaska and Canada so we thought we would meet up before they went up to Prague to start a cruise down the Danube. Munich seemed like a good place to meet.
It rained heavily on Tuesday, so we had a look around the town but we weren't too impressed (how can you be impressed by any city in the rain reallzy). On Tuesday arvo we hired a car and drove south to see a castle we had heard about. About an hour out of Munich the landscape changed drastically. We had reached the beautiful Alps!
The Alps are so beautiful. The grass is emerald green, the trees smattered with the gold and red of of autumn and the mountains steep and jagged. The clouds obscured the tops of the mountains, but it didn't seem to matter any more that it was raining because everything was so crystal clean and beautiful.
I had booked our guesthouse on the internet, but we didn't have very good maps with us. We had an A4 page of the entire of Germany, but the town we were staying in wasn't on the map. After nearly two hours we saw a sign saying something along the lines of 'welcome to Osterich'. We figured we couldn't be in Germany so we took it as a sign that we should look out for tall, long-necked birds. Eventually we found the guest house in the tiny town of Pflach.
The guest house was lovely. We both had large rooms with ensuite and the view of the mountains from my toilet was inspirational! We went down to the bar for our first German beer and Mum asked the hostess in her best German: what country are we in.
We were in Austria!
Its a simple mistake to make really. The alps cover parts of Germany, Austria and Switzerland and if you go the wrong way you can easily end up in Litchenstein (for 10 minutes until you pass out the other side). Of course, one would expect when making an accommodation booking that one knew what country the guest house was in...
We were so impressed by the alps that we extended our booking on the car and spent an extra day. We drove down to lovely Innsbruk for lunch before gliding back (in the super-charged Audi) through scenes that come straight out of a picture book. Rolling green meadows fringed with snow capped blue peaks, cow bells echoing through the crisp fresh air, tiny villages nestled around steepled churches with flower baskets under every window.
The next day we visited the castle that mad King Ludwig built to celebrate the Swan and the Wagnerian opera. The castle looks just like the Disneyland fairytale castle, perched high on the hill overlooking villages and lakes below. It would be hard not to be impressed by the vistas.
On the way, we set the GPS and sat back to let the placid tones of our auto pilot guide our supercharged vehicle back to Munich at 140 km per hour.
Ahhhh....
