Category: Austria

If this Austrian End to End started with Bangs, it ended with – well, not exactly whimpers, but maybe a shrug and a meh. The last few foggy, drearily uneventful floodbank-top miles of Danube Path were like Philip Glass played on a hurdy-gurdy. For five hours. Except that I rather enjoyed the quiet solitude of…

A rest day (hence the brackets) in Vienna. Nigel went to Budapest to have lunch, while I stayed in town to do chores. I replaced brake blocks, did laundry, and attended to some work admin. Not especially because I had to, but I thought it sounded good to say I was ‘doing some writing from…

Johann Strauss’s first draft of what was to become On the beautiful blue Danube was a mundane song praising the virtues of street lighting. (This is true.) Well, today’s stretch of Danube path was definitely more in that vein than the azure lilt of the more famous version. It was foggy and chilly most of…

It wasn’t exactly Instagram weather for the runners doing the Linz Marathon this morning: thick fog, with a visibility of less than five metres. A hot-air balloon, burners roaring, was preparing for take-off, which seemed a trifle optimistic. The lack of views wasn’t going to trouble us unduly though. We spent all day following the…

The forecast rain came as something of a relief after days of autumn sun. It’s possible to have too much honey, after all. But all this Scotch mist was making me a little homesick, as was the headline in the morning paper about our government back home: Britisches Chaos. We had a good-humoured conversation about…

With nobody at hostel reception to open up the bike store for me, we couldn’t check out. So I took matters, and the key, into my own hands, trespassing behind the unstaffed counter and rummaging in a drawer to find it. It was a damp, cloudy morning, as if the weather had suddenly remembered overnight…

A plunge to the valley floor this morning, and then a day of more green and lovely plains in warm autumn mountainscapes. And, perhaps most pleasingly, a rhubarb Streusel: sunny Austrian castle-town cafe meets gloomy Yorkshire forcing-shed. One stretch of riverside cycle path in Bischofshofen was so good we could have turned right round and…

Thanks to the hens and ducks in the hostel garden, we could enjoy a fine breakfast of fresh poached eggs on toast. Thanks to my cooking, they turned out scrambled. Thanks to my aim, they were barely on the plate, never mind the toast Still, it set us up for the morning, and I proved…

Another glorious day of sunshine, smooth paths and thrilling scenery. Our fast, flat run out of Innsbruck was punctuated by a fine rich coffee and pastry in a classy historic-centre cafe. That clearly doesn’t narrow it down when trying to identify where it was, because it seems all Austrian cafes are like that. We lunched…

A sixty-mile descent to Innsbruck today, all in gloriously sunny autumn weather on beautiful car-free paths. First though we had to get up to the 1800m summit of the Arlberg Pass, fuelled by about half-a-dozen eggs each from our splendid guesthouse breakfast. Not your ordinary lays, but fresh quail’s eggs, from their own organic smallholding….