Radstadt e fancied going somewhere Alpine, but also fancied a change to our usual destinations of the Swiss and French Alps. Judith’s parents suggested that we meet them in the Austrian town of Radstadt, so off we went.
Eurotunnel Friday - As it’s nearly 900 miles to Radstadt, our usual approach of nipping across the Channel on Friday evening to Calais and then driving the rest of the way on Saturday wasn’t going to work as it would leave us with nearly 800 miles to drive on Saturday. So we left home at lunchtime with a view to covering a few hundred miles before turning in for the night.We started well, getting to Folkestone early enough to catch an earlier train, but then got suck in this queue whilst boarding due to a broken down vehicle on the train itself. In the end we got away pretty much when we’d originally expected to.
Saint Avold After a magnificently relaxing drive down the nearly deserted French motorways on Friday afternoon and evening, we finally called it a day at the Novotel near Saint Avold, having covered a pleasing 420 miles.
Novotel There was just time for a beer and some snacks in the bar before bed.
Apartment Saturday - Most of the drive on Saturday was across Germany, which turned out to be a stressful nightmare compared to our relaxed progress across France. The motorways in Germany are very busy (like driving in England) and the bit between Stuttgart and Munich (about 250 miles worth) is being widened so there are major roadworks every 20 miles or so. And on the bits between the roadworks, people are driving at some ferocious speeds.We did come across one short section of deserted, unrestricted motorway, so I put my foot down and got to an indicated 130mph before slowing for traffic ahead. I don’t know how people dare drive at 150mph+ for extended periods.Anyway, having safely negotiated the insanity of the Germany autobahns, we made our way into Austria and arrived in Radstadt late in the afternoon.This is a photo of the lounge/diner of our comfortable apartment.
Apartment View This is the view looking to the South-East from our balcony.
Apartment View This is the view looking to the South-West from our balcony. The tower in the distance is in the centre of Radstadt.
Franziskaner Time for dinner and a beer in the excellent Sporthotel adjacent to our apartment before turning in for a well earned rest.
Radstadt View Sunday - I’m off for a walk and Judith (just visible in the foreground) is off for second breakfast with her parents (as we went for breakfast early so that I could set off before it got too hot - it was already 24C out when I took this photo).
Radstadt View Before long the trail is starting to ascent and the views are starting to improve.
Valley View I’ve probably climbed a couple of thousand feet now and the views are getting very nice indeed.
Rossbrand Just before I reached the top of the hill, I ascended into the clouds, the temperature dropped from the mid-20s to about 10C and it started raining lightly. Doh! This is the view of the Hutte at Rossbrand. Still, it’s been a good walk to the top.
Cows While I was taking the last photo, these cows wandered over and started licking my rucksack.
Dachstein View A few hundred meters from the Hutte is a panoramic viewpoint. This is supposed to be the magnificent view to the Dachstein mountain range on the other side of the valley.There’s a road up to Rossbrand, so Judith and her parents drove up and met me for lunch before I started the walk back down.
Trails As in the other Alpine resorts I’ve visited, the trails are excellently marked, making them very easy to follow.
Radstadt Whilst it took me nearly two-and-a-half hours to make my way to the top, it takes much less time to get back down again and I’m soon seeing views of Radstadt in the distance.
Radstadt After getting back to the hotel and having a bit of a rest, Judith and I go for a quick walk into Radstadt before dinner. This is a view of their immaculately maintained cemetery.Excellent dinner in the Sporthotel. Although I did feel a bit guilty about the trout that was swimming about in a tank outside the hotel when I arrived and had gone when I left after I’d had a lovely trout fillet for my dinner :o(
Liechtensteinerklamm Gorge Monday - As the day was a bit grey and damp anyway, we thought we’d drive to the Liechtensteinklamm Gorge, since gorges are a bit grey and damp even at the best of times.On the way in we saw this interesting sign. I’m not sure if the message was simply lost in translation, or whether it was just me that was failing to grasp some crucial bit of information.
Gorge Regardless of what the sign was or was not supposed to say, the gorge itself was magnificent. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to build this brilliant (and sturdy) walkway for over a kilometer down the gorge.
Gorge Judith in the gorge.
Gorge This is one of those moments where the view before me was stunningly amazing and the photo has completely failed to capture the grandeur of the moment.
Gorge Judith on one of the bridges in the gorge, being careful not to “confluence” or lean on the handrail in case it is overloaded.
Waterfall A waterfall in the gorge rendered in black and white. Although I had no ND10 filter, or even a polarising filter, it was dark enough in the gorge that an f/14 aperture at ISO100 was sufficient for a 1/3 second shutter, which blurred the water nicely.
Waterfall Another black and white blurry waterfall in the gorge.
Stairs This is one of those photos that I thought nothing of at the time but has turned out to be one of my favourite pictures of the week. It was also a tough one to take as the rock wall on the right is in full sun, while the water and rock on the left is in deep shade. HDR to the rescue.
Gorge In places the gorge is only a few feet wide and you can literally lean over the handrail (having first taken care to ensure that it isn’t overloaded) and touch the other side.
Door By this time we had gorged ourselves on the gorge sufficiently, so decided to go and gorge ourselves in one of the gorge’s restaurants, where I had some very nice garlic soup and Judith had an impressively massive slice of apple strudel.This door was in the wall next to the restaurant’s terrace and looked sufficiently interesting that I couldn’t help but take a photo of it.
Hohenwafen Castle On the way back to Radstadt we took a short detour to have a look at the Hohenwafen Castle, where the famous film Where Eagles Dare was apparently made.
Hohenwafen Castle Another view of Hohenwafen Castle that is slightly less obscured by Judith’s car.
Dachstein Tuesday - Lovely weather on this day, so we decided to drive to the Dachstein and go up their cablecar. Fortunately there was a webcam channel on the TV in our apartment and one of the webcams they were showing was from the top of the Dachstein cablecar, so we could see that it was lovely and clear before we’d even left home, which was handy.
Cachstein Cablecar This is the Dachstein cablecar and, yes, there are people standing on the top of it. We had to stand inside on the way up, but we did get to have a go on the top on the way back down, which was sort of exciting. There are probably not so many people wanting to do that on rainy days though.
Dachstein View At the top, this viewing platform pokes out over the edge of the mountain. There’s a glass floor at the end of it too. I did have a quick go on that, but as it had a lot of snow and ice on it, it was tricky to see that you were actually standing one inch over a drop of several hundred feet.
Sky Walk They’ve also built this suspension bridge at the top, which is probably marginally more interesting than standing on the glass floor. I’ve been on loads of precarious looking suspension bridges over massive drops though, so I couldn’t be bothered to queue for the privilege of paying an extra four Euros to walk across this one.
Dachstein View There’s a good view from up here though.
Glacier Walk Considering the rate they were ferrying people up to the top on the cabelcar, we were initially surprised it didn’t seem busier. Until we spotted what looked like a trail of ants disappearing into the distance across the snow.Clearly they were going somewhere very interesting, so we decided to follow them.
Glacier Trail Judith on the glacier trail. The sun was reflecting so brightly off the unbroken snow out here that it was pretty much impossible to see anything at all without sunglasses on.
Glacier Trail Looking back along the trail, you can see that is goes on for quite a while. The scenery is almost stunning beyond belief and the tiny people in the distance only serve to provide some much needed scale to the view.
Off Piste This fellow has apparently got fed up of following everyone else on the trail and had decided to forge his own path.
Off Piste If you look carefully near the middle of the photo, you can still just about make out the adventurous fellow half way up the snowy slope. Goodness knows where he was heading.
Climbing Not satisfied with just walking about and enjoying the view, this lot were setting off on a climb.
Climbing Again, you can still just see the climbers on the right side of this photo. I’m so glad I feel no urge to participate in this sort of bonkers activity.
Walking As Judith is incredibly slow when it comes to walking uphill, she’d fallen a way behind me on the way up the trail. Here she is in the distance, in the centre of the photo.
End of the Trail The trail ended at a small Hutte at the top of a large cliff. This is the view from there.
Ants In the distance I can still see the trail of people making their way across the snow.
The Way Back After a few minutes Judith caught up with me. Unfortunately we didn’t have time to hang around at the Hutte for some lunch as we only had an hour to get back to the cablecar for our scheduled ride down.
Cablecar We made it back with several minutes to spare for our ride down on the roof of the gondola. As we left the cablecar station we got a good view of the poking out bit I took the photo of earlier. You can just make out the people standing on the glass floor.
Roof Just in case any proof were needed that were really were standing on the roof of the gondola.
View The views standing on the top were definitely better than the views you get from inside, even if you happen to be lucky enough to be standing near one of the windows the had been heavily scratched by countless skiis and snowboards.
Turlwandhutte As we’d missed out on lunch at the top, once we were back at the bottom we decided to pop into the nearby Turlwandhutte for a bite to eat.
Turlwandhutte There was a lovely view from their terrace.
Lunch While I was tempted to keep lunch light and just order a bowl of soup, I was intrigued by the “Turlwandhutte Special”, which turned out to be a massive pan of chips topped off with sausage, beef and pork steak. Judith’s pasta dish wasn’t appreciably more modest in its aspirations.
Riesachfall Having stuffed ourselves to bursting point at the Turlwandhutte, we thought it might be a good idea to stop off on the way back to our apartment to go for a bit of a walk. So we detoured to the Riesachfall, where the brochure said there was a 2km (1.4 mile) circular trail to see a waterfall and a lake.We were barely out of the car park before we came upon the waterfall - or at least the bottom bit of it.
Riesachfall Five minutes further up the trail and more waterfall.
Riesachfall I really like this photo because it’s so tricky to see what it is. It was taken from a bridge over the top of one of the waterfalls, looking straight down.
Riesachfall These waterfalls just go on and on and on.
Bridge Despite the fact that the guidebook said the round trip was only 2km (1.4 miles), we’d walked further than that to get to this suspension bridge, which was still a couple of hundred meters below the level of the lake. Clearly the guidebook was wrong. The question was how wrong.
"Stairs" The trail was also shown as being of “medium” difficulty. However, it was littered with walkways and stairs, some of which were fairly stair-like and some of which were so steep as to effectively be ladders, like the ones in the photo.
Waterfall A waterfal pouring straight down the side of the mountain, fortunately on the opposite side to the side we were walking on (unlike that one in Grindelwald a few years ago that was falling straight onto the trail we were walking on).
Waterfall Did I mention that there were loads of waterfalls on this trail?
Riesachsee After just over two hours walking/climbing, we finally made it to the lake, having covered almost three miles! So much for the 1.4 mile round trip. Here’s Judith admiring the view and being thankful that there are no more stairs to climb or suspension bridges to cross.
Riesachsee While Judith sat on the bench in the previous photo and considered the exciting journey she’d taken to get here, I walked right down to the level of the lake, just in case there were any nice reflections to be observed and captured. There were not. It was still a nice view though.
Valley View The route back was much more straightforward and simply followed a dirt access road. There were nice views of the valley on the way down.
Valley View Despite the fact that the sky looks fairly clear and sunny, between the last photo and this photo we got heavily rained on for about fifteen minutes. Fortunately we were packing wet weather kit, so avoided a soaking.
Valley View A final look at the view down the valley. I’ve taken my exposure reading from the bright sky, which has plunged the bits of the valley in shade into complete darkness.All in on our alleged 2km (1.4 mile) round trip we had covered 7.4km (4.6 miles). There were a few other trails in this area listed in the guidebook, a couple of which I would have quite liked to have a go at. However, given that a 1.4 mile trail had turned out to be over three times as long, I didn’t have any confidence in tackling a trail that the guidebook showed as being around 14 miles long.We headed back to the hotel for what we felt was a well earned dinner.
Radstadt View Wednesday - Judith wanted to hang around in the apartment for the morning as she had an Open University assignment to complete, so I headed out for a walk up the other side of the valley to the one I’d tackled on Sunday.After an hour or so I was high enough to get some nice views of Radstadt.
Predigtstuhl After another hour or so I completely accidentally made it to a view point at Predigtstuhl, which is only marked by a bench on the top of a sheer cliff that is several hundred feet tall. There’s nothing on the map to indicate that it’s here and I nearly walked past the spur on the main trail. From Predigtstuhl there’s a nice view down into the valley and across to the Dachstein, where we were yesterday.
Blocked It seems to me that if you’re going to have hiking trails and go to the trouble of signposting them so that people can walk on them, there should also be some sort of burden of responsibility to keep them clear of fallen trees. I passed a few blockages like this during the morning.
Blair Witch! I also passed this stack of stones in the middle of the trail, which was a bit Blair Witch.
Warning A couple of miles further on and the trail became a sort of dirt road, at the start of which was this interesting sign. Presumably it means no vintage cars or World War II style motorcycle couriers permitted on this trail?
Cactus On my way back into Radstadt, I passed this Citroen Cactus parked outside a Citroen dealership. They had only just gone on sale in Austria and won’t be on sale in the UK until October. I think it looks rather nice. It’s supposed to be very relaxing to drive too. Can’t wait to have a go in one.
Zauchansee I made it safely back to the hotel by the mid afternoon. Judith has (more or less) finished her assignment, so we decided to go out for a drive and ended up at the Zauchansee. I can imagine that this is quite a pleasant spot when the sun is out. Unfortunately for us it had just stared raining lightly.
Zauchensee From the northern end of the lake we could see the ski resort at the other end of the lake. At this time of year it’s pretty much deserted, although there were a few people about, which gave it the feel of the Arc 1950 resort we visited at this time last year.As it was well and truly raining by now, we decided to head back to the hotel for some dinner.
Vroom! Back at the hotel we discovered that it had been overrun with hoards of Ferraris and a few Maseratis. Apparently a Swiss Ferrari/Maserati dealership was hosting some sort of Alpine tour for its customers.
Ferraris All in I reckon there must have been thirty or more Ferraris in the hotel’s car park. They were all pretty new ones too. No Magnum PI classics, Testarossas or their like to be seen here.
Rossbrand Thursday - Got up to lots of cloud. However, all of the webcams on the webcam channel were showing glorious sunshine at higher altitudes. So I jumped in the car and headed for Rossbrand, where I’d walked to on Sunday.At first there were just grey clouds overhead, then I was just driving through grey clouds. But after a few minutes of driving through the clouds it started to get brighter and I was greeted by this magnificent view of the sun shining through the trees.
Rossbrand The mist was clearing by the minute, so I took a couple more photos before heading off.
Rossbrand Five minutes later and I was in the car park at the top in the brilliant sunshine.Judith’s car looks remarkably shiny in this photo. This must be some sort of trick of the light because in actual fact it was thoroughly filthy, having been alternately rained on and baked in the sunshine several times over by this point.That’s the Dachstein in the background.
Clouds And this is what I rushed up here to see - a valley full of clouds.
Clouds Looking to the West.
Dachstein View While I was up there, I thought I’d pop back to the view point I’d visited on Sunday when I was unable to see much of anything at all. This is definitely a much better view.
Communications Tower Further along the ridge I can see the communications tower that has been visible from so many of the places we’ve visited during the week. If I’d had a bit more time I’d have walked over to have a look at that (but I’d skipped breakfast to drive up here before the clouds evaporated and was starting to get a bit hungry).
Dachstein View A final look at the view before heading off for a late breakfast.
Radstadt Back at the apartment and it occurred to me that this was the first time I’d seen this view while I’d actually had my SLR in my hand. So here’s the SLR version of the view from the end of the driveway to our apartment.
Secret Mini Judith’s dad had recommended that we have a drive up to the Grossglockner, as it’s a magnificent drive with some magnificent views. And there’s a glacier, which is always quite entertaining.Near the start of the road to the Grossglockner a Mini sporting what appeared to be a whacky paint job drove past us going in the opposite direction. We quickly identified it as being a new model under test - some sort of very large five-door Mini.A few minutes later, I’d stopped to take a photo of the view and it drove past us again, this time going in the same direction as us. We followed it back to a hotel a couple of miles up the road where there were a whole load of BMWs and Minis in various states of disguise, as well as one of the new hybrid BMW i8s and a couple of what I think were Active Tourers - the new front-wheel-drive BMWs. We also clearly identified the car we’d been following as the new Mini Clubman, which isn’t due to go on sale for another 18 months or so.If you’re going to go out testing your “secret” new cars, it seems strange that you would choose to test them on a road that’s basically full of tourists with cameras taking pictures of the views. Perhaps these cars are now at a sufficient stage of development that BMW/Mini think a bit of free publicity wouldn’t go amiss?
Toll! What Judith’s dad had failed to tell us when he was describing how brilliant this road is, was that it costs EUR34 to actually be allowed to drive on it in the first place (he thought it might put us off going, which it might very well have done given that I didn’t know how brilliant it was/is at the time).
Hyundai While we were sitting at the side of the road considering being unexpectedly fleeced of EUR34, this car pulled up behind us. Between the tape on the nose and the sheets of canvas covering the entire rest of the car, it was completely impossible to even hazzard a guess as to what might be lurking underneath. However, it was being followed by a Hyundai, so we supposed that it might also be one of those.Judith subsequently found some spy-shots on the internet of a new Hyundai that looked very much like this one, so it seems a safe assumption that’s what it probably is.
View Anyway, we paid our toll and headed off up the road. The views were almost instantly excellent.
Road Just look at that road winding up the mountainside. And it’s over 30 miles long! It’s no wonder that car manufacturers bring their new cars here to test them out.
Shiny Judith’s car is still looking very shiny in the photos despite that fact that it is most definitely not.
Edelweiss-Spitze The peak in the distance with the road winding up it is Edelweiss-Spitze. At 2,571m (8,432 feet), it’s the highest point on the road.
Edelweiss-Spitze This is a) the view from the top, and b) the road to the top. The road is cobbled, which is a bit challenging for the masses of cyclists that like to ride here. Busses are not permitted because they simply wouldn’t get round the hairpin bends. Although we did see someone in a fairly large camper making slow but steady progress towards the top.
Edelweiss-Spitze And this is the view of the top from the top. As you can see, loads of motorcyclists. There’s also a nice looking Hutte-style restaurant up here, but we didn’t have time to try that as it was already early afternoon and we were barely a quarter of the way up the road yet!
Edelweiss-Spitze View You can see a long, long way from Edelweiss-Spitze.
Glacier Anyway, we pressed on and I forced myself not to keep stopping every two minutes to take photos of the amazing views, otherwise we would never get to the top.This is the road approaching the Kaiser-Franz-Josefs-Hohe Visitors’ Centre, which is directly opposite the highest mountain in Austria, the Grossglockner (3,798m - 12,457 feet) and next to the Pasterze glacier, which is apparently the “longest glacier in the eastern Alps”.
Kaiser-Franz-Josefs-Hohe Visitors’ Centre And here’s the visitor centre. Quite impressive.
Pasterze Judith outside the visitor centre looking at the Pasterze glacier. There was a little train thing that was taking people down to the glacier, but as we’d arrived rather late in the day, we didn’t have time for that.There doesn’t seem to be much of the glacier left these days, although it’s hard to tell with these sort of things as they tend to get covered with rocks and grit, which makes them look a bit less expansive than they actually are.
Lunch Even though it was the middle of the afternoon, we’d not eaten anything since breakfast, so we popped into the restaurant for a snack. Nice view from their terrace.
Terrace View This is the view from the restaurant’s terrace, looking in the other direction.
Trail There was a short trail behind the visitor centre, so we thought we’d go for a bit of a walk. There was a nice view of the glacier and the roof of the multi-storey car park.
Marmots? Here’s Judith looking for marmots.
Marmots! And here are some baby marmots.
Marmot And here’s a full-sized marmot relaxing in the sunshine. There were actually loads and loads of marmots all over the place.
Twin Dams There’s a reservoir at the base of the glacier that’s been created by these two dams. I don’t think I‘ve ever seen a reservoir created using two dams before, but I imagine it probably happens quite regularly.On the way back down it was very tough not to keep stopping and taking photos of all of the things I’d taken photos of on the way up. But it was getting late and we needed to get back to the hotel for our dinner reservation.On the way back down we passed what looked like all of the disguised BMWs and Minis we’d seen at the hotel earlier on their way up the mountain. We stopped in a convenient layby for a few minutes to see if they turned round and came back down again, thereby providing an opportunity to snap a few photos of them, but they didn’t. Doh!
Ferraris Back at the hotel and, if anything, there were more Ferraris there today than there had been the previous evening.
599 GTO I think this 599 GTO was my favourite, although I am rather fond of the breadvan-styled FF too. There was one of those in the car park too, but it wasn’t in a good spot for a photo.
Lambo This Lamborghini Murcielago had also managed to sneak in amongst the Ferraris. Maybe his/her Ferrari broke down on the way here and (s)he had to go home for his/her spare car?Anyway, dinner was very good, even though we had to eat outside on the terrace because the restaurant was full of Ferrari (and Lamborghini) owners. And so ended our last full day in Radstadt.We’d had a bit of rain, but a lot more sun. We’d seen a gorge and glaciers and snow and many, many mountains and eaten lots of excellent food. All in, we’d had a jolly good week in Radstadt. All that was left now was to drive nearly 900 miles home.
Sofitel Friday - We had given ourselves two days to get home, as I’m not sure it’s physically possible to drive 900 miles in one day. So we had a leisurely breakfast before leaving Radstadt in the mid-morning.We made steady progress for the first couple of hours and were beginning to think that we might even make it as far as Brugge before dinner. Then we got to Stuttgart, at which point the traffic just ground to a halt. After moving about a mile in an hour, with the sat-nav indicating that all of the nearby motorways were stuffed, we decided to go off-piste and head cross country back into France.It took us two-and-a-half hours to get onto a motorway near Strasbourg, during which time we drove through a massive thunderstorm and torrential rain and had a couple of those scary moments where the steering wheel goes terrifyingly light in your hands for a couple of seconds as you drive through a big pool of standing water.Still, once we were on a French motorway we started to make brisk progress again. But we’d been delayed sufficiently that reaching Brugge was now out of the question. So we headed for Luxembourg instead, where we checked into the wonderful Sofitel in time for dinner.This is a photo of the hotel’s impressive atrium.
Sofitel This is the view down the lift lobby.
Sofitel Back in the atrium.
Sofitel Last one of the atrium.
Luxembourg Saturday - This is the view of Luxembourg City from the Grand Duchess Charlotte Bridge, which was just a few minutes walk from our hotel.
Towers A couple of the impressive looking office blocks near our hotel.It started raining as I was taking this photo, so I ducked back to the hotel, which was handily just across the road.After breakfast we re-packed the car (in the rain) and headed off...
...To Brugge Although it was raining when we left Luxembourg, the weather improved steadily as we drove north and it was rather nice and sunny by the time we arrived in Brugge.As Brugge is around 200 miles from Luxembourg, it was well into the afternoon by the time we parked up. We headed straight for the newly refurbished Straffe Hendrik Brewery (this is a photo of their new bar) for lunch. And it as just as well that we did, since we got there at 14:55 and they stop serving food at 15:00.
Beef Stew Although they have a relatively extensive menu, it’s a complete no-brainer what to order - beef stew. It’s properly awesome and well worth driving 200 miles for.After our late lunch we had a bit of a walk around town in the sunshine before popping in to the Bottle Shop for a few beers to take home with us. Then it was time to head for the Eurotunnel.
Home! About three hours later and we were home, having covered 2,063 miles during almost two days (!) behind the wheel.And so another top holiday comes to an end. We had a great time in Austria, but unless you have a lot of time to spare, I think it’s a bit far to drive to from the UK. If we go again, and I think we will, we shall likely fly to Salzburg or Vienna and pick up a hire car.