The Road Home from Austria

Saturday 19 August 2000. We have to say goodbye to Austria as the coach set off north for Belgium. We were to stay overnight in Belgium and then back to the UK the following day.

Gazing out of the coach window brought a few reminders of the scenery we had enjoyed during our few days in Austria.

At times it threatened to remind us of some of the weather we had sheltered from during our evening walks!

We said goodbye to the musical box chalets that had been almost the only shape of building we had seen for a week!

We had seen so many chalets and other buildings of the same basic design that I was actually looking forward to seeing a house without a balcony and with a four-sided roof! The Austrian-German border came and was crossed and we turned onto a road with markers every kilometre. We would stay on this one road for several hours and the first marker read 510 km.

The Germans were building a new high-speed railway and we saw construction works every now and then as the road weaved its way alongside, over and under the embankments and cuttings of the railway.

There were also the occasional castles to break the monotony of the flat landscape. I watched throughout the day as we stayed on this one road until a marker said 1 km and we reached the border with the Netherlands.

The following day, rain spattered the coach window as we left the hotel in Belgium. "Where's your camera?" demanded Janet! It didn't do very much though and we set off from Antwerp towards France and the ferry port of Calais. A stop at a Belgian chocolate factory found the factory already full of visitors but the same firm had an outlet at the wine cash & carry near Calais so no-one seemed unduly worried! The border posts on the Belgian/French border were still there but were now deserted for most of the time as Europe had opened its frontiers to other European countries.

Er... the white bits (top left) are the reflection of the coach windows on the opposite side of the coach and not - as they might at first appear - a ghostly washing line of Y-fronts...

The odd reminder that 2 world wars were fought over this land and several typical French farms and villages flashed by until we reached Calais. The ferry crossing was smooth and we transferred to our feeder coach, swapping news and views with the people we had travelled from Blackpool with 8 days before.

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Königsee and the Jennerbahn

Monday 14 August 2000. After our morning in Berchtesgaden, we got back to the coach and motored on for another while before coming to Königsee.

We passed several of these wonderful chalet style buidings both large and small, but always exquisitely decked out in blooms of colour. We learned that the "see" part of Königsee's name meant "lake".

In the case of Königsee it was a crystal clear turquoise lake with tiny fish darting from underneath at any bread thrown to the ducks. Towering over the lake were several mountains.

We had a couple of hours free time and we had at first thought to go for a cruise on the lake.

However the long line of people who had all had similar thoughts put us off a wee bit and we stood for a while drinking in the sights and sounds. Before we found our drink though, Fran saw a notice for a cable car and we set off to find out if the queue was any less than for the boats. It was! In fact there was no queue whatsoever! The man in the kiosk told us that the car took 30 minutes to go up plus another 30 to come down again - plenty of time for us to take the trip and to spend a bit of time at the top.

So we walked through the turnstiles and got straight into a small two-person cable car which after a short pause launched us off up the mountain on the Jennerbahn. Again by way of explanation, Jenner was the name of the mountain and bahn means train or in this case a linked series of little cabins, suspended from the cable above.

The cable car was glazed with plastic and the door was locked. It very soon got boiling hot in there! The cable car opened in 1953 and due to the length of the cable (4.2km or 2.6 miles) it has to pass through a middle station where the gradient changes.

We approached, passed through, and left the middle station without any bother and the cable began to rise more steeply. The upper section of the cable was not only steeper but longer than that from the lake to the middle station.

And here we are, arriving at the top station. The Jenner mountain stands 1874m tall (6148ft) and the cable car travels 4.2 kilometers to get to the top.

The view from the top. We looked for the lake far below but were not able to spot it. Possibly because the cable car route takes a bt of a dog-leg bend at the middle station and also because the lower portion of the mountain is heavily forested.

We checked the time and decided there was plenty of time to sit and have a drink at the top of the mountain before climbing back into another oven for the journey back down!

The journey back down was as scenic if not more so than the jouney up. We had the added excitement of watching out for the lake to come into view. As we left the Jennerbahn we took a last look at the lake then back to the coach. A family of four are missing.

After half an hour they tumbled into the coach, breathless. They had been told that the boat trip would get them back in time but in fact they had had to get off at the first stop and then had to apologise and beg to queue-jump a line of 100 people to get back. "Was it worth it though?" one of the others asked. "No - we spent all the time worrying that the coach would have gone!"

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Berchtesgaden

Monday 14 August 2000. We are startled awake on the first morning of our stay in Austria. Is it an avalanche? Is it the jangle of cowbells from the cattle on the hills? Is it the yodelling of a herdsman high on the hills above Schüttdorf?

No... it's the church bells of this church directly opposite our window! It started at 6:00am with four bongs for the hour then six bongs for the time then every 15 minutes, a bong for each quarter hour, i.e. one bong at quarter past the hour, two bongs at half past and three bongs at quarter to the hour. Hence the four bongs at six o'clock denoting the hour had been reached then another six bongs for six o'clock. At 7:00am the bell ringer took out all of his frustrations on yet another bell... After four for the hour and seven for the time, he rang out three sets of twenty bongs presumably to call people for morning prayer. There was a bit of moaning at breakfast from some sleepy tourists, though I always take the view that if you travel in foreign climes you don't start off by complaining about their traditions.

This was our hotel: the Pinzgauhof in Shüttdorff. I learned another important fact to bear in mind when using a back-to-front toilet (see first article in this series). Gentlemen with dangly bits should stand before flushing as the jet of water slides everything behind you forwards. A collision can be traumatic...

Ok, first excursion time. It took a while to find the coach - Driver John told us to look for and go down an alley. He must have had a different definition of an alley to me! They must be a lot bigger in Kent and Essex to Lancashire... The coach had brought holidaymakers on two trips. The other was a walking holiday so the coach had a few spare seats! We allowed ourselves to spread out a bit.

First stop was Berchtesgaden for which we crossed back into Germany - Bavaria. We hadn't brought any German money out with us (this was before the Euro came in), not realising that we were going to be leaving Austria but in the event it didn't matter as we shall see.

From here you could take an optional extra trip to see Hitler's wartime bunker which is nearby - just about where the von Trapps would have been arrested had they really attempted to walk over the mountains as depicted in The Sound of Music. We opted to look around the town. Wartime coal storage bins hold no interest for me...

Picturesque views were on all sides! Each house or hotel had its own colour scheme for the flowers and we seldom saw two the same next to each other. We saw many roadside shrines and some buildings also had saintly figures cast in relief on walls or corners or over porches.

Fran and I on the hill overlooking the lower part of the town and with a splendid backdrop of mountains. It was now getting towards lunch!

We went into a cafe and, apologising for my terrible German, I asked if Austrian schillings were acceptable. I was pleased when without even a flinch the proprietess answered back in German that they were. She turned out to speak excellent English, as did her staff. So, as she had answered me in German, I presumed I must have got it right!

We had a light snack then went berserk and undid all the good dietary self-denial with a slice of apfel strudel with ice cream. Iss gute... iss fielen gute!

Then feeling suitably guilty we had an urge to walk it off! We had another quick turn around the town and then decided that we had enough time to venture a bit further.

As the coach had come into the town earlier, the road went alongside one of the wonderfully clear pastel blue-green rivers. The river had passed under a covered bridge - just about unknown in England - and I fancied a photo of it. The hill was steeper and longer than I had thought! However, we made it down to the bottom and just look at the colour of that wonderfully pure meltwater from high in the Alps. Then back up to the coach in time where we fondly imagined - wrongly - that we had made up for the apple strudel...

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Magical Markets of the Rhine Valley

Join us for a long weekend trip by coach to the German Christmas Markets along the River Rhine, 6-9 December 2019.

Each article can be accessed by clicking/tapping the six photos below. A link on each page will bring you back here.

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Assmannhausen and Wiesbaden

Sunday 8 December 2019. It's Sunday morning and with quarter of an hour before we have to get on the coach, we dash down the street to take a few photos of Assmannhausen.

The streets are very narrow and the corners very tight. And the sticky-out bit just above the pink on this building, very scarred from meeting buses, coaches and lorries...

Looking back from further down the hill.

At the bottom of the hill is a level crossing. Railways run along both sides of the Rhine. Our side gets more goods traffic than passenger traffic and the other side vice versa. Time to get on the coach.

Our first stop of the day is a city called Wiesbaden. It's Sunday morning and as yet is fairly deserted.

There is a skating rink and a small Christmas Market, but as yet most of the stalls are still boarded over and closed. Wiesbaden is a spa town and has 14 hot springs. It once had 26 apparently. Anyway, we didn't see any of them...

We wandered through a shopping mall with no open shops and then along a few streets of offices and shops that were also shut and got a bit lost. We saw a Big Wheel slowly turning and that turned out to be shut as well, as we were turned away at the turnstile. (That's as many "turns" as I can get out of a Big Wheel...)

A few stalls of the Christmas Market were starting to open, but it was bitterly cold for walking about.

We found the skating rink again. I confess I've never strapped either skates nor planks of wood to my feet and have no intention of doing so. We wandered back to the coach, freezing, about an hour before we needed to. We weren't the first ones back by any means.

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An Hour in Boppard

Saturday 7 December 2019. The cruise along the Rhine onboard the Loreley Star has brought us to Boppard, where we spot our coach parked up ready to take us onto our final destination for the day.

More of that later though, as first we have some time to explore this ancient town. One of the first buildings we see after turning away from the Rhine Promenade is this slate-built inn.

Many of the older buildings are highly decorated either with carving or painted murals, such as this coaching scene.

St Severus's church dominates the end of the this row of impressive buildings. Remains dating back 13,000 years were found near here and there are Roman remains in the vicinity also, though we failed to stumble over them.

But hang on a moment... This is about half past twelve in the afternoon on a Saturday. Where is everybody? Fran suggested they may have all gone to find a Christmas Market, but even so, the streets are very quiet.

Admittedly the drizzly weather wouldn't be helping, but we trot about looking for something to eat. We only want a snack. Sandwiches are not easily found in Germany as far as my own experience provides any evidence. We found a bakery and opted for croissants of which there was a selection of types and flavours.

Our short time in Boppard was coming to an end. We made our way back to the Rhine to see that the Loreley Star seemed to have given up any thoughts of another trip for the day.

We had a short walk along the river to where the coach was parked. Behind it this building had a rather strange structure on the corner of a garden or patio wall.

All aboard! Our next - and final - stop for the day will be Koblenz. Final stop, but first Christmas market! Lead on MacDuff - oops... Herr von Duff...

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