Thursday morning started with low clouds hanging around the campsite; perhaps a good day to sit in Eileen and travel 150kms to the next campsite. We left at 9:20am and just as we got on to the main road heading out of Zel- Am-See we hit a short traffic jam. This was quickly followed by another traffic jam in Taxenbach, where we sat for half an hour hardly moving at all. I guess with snow around for a large part of the year, all the road works need to be done in the summer months, but my goodness it must be bad for their economy with so many trucks and vans held up for so long. It must also frustrate the locals when they only want to get to the next town for a pint of milk. When we finally reached Bischofshofen at the junction for the A10, we had to choose between north to Salzburg, or south to Slovenia! We turned south, but not having enough time left to do any justice to Slovenia, we turned off the A10 at Niedernfritz and continued to zig-zag through valleys all the way up to Hallstatt.
Short term parking turned out to be a bit of an issue in Hallstatt and there were a lot of trees and rubbish floating around in the lake and a lot of rocks and rubble piled up in various places around the village. We wondered if they had had some storm damage and after checking the internet since, it seems that the village was rather badly damaged on June 19th by mudslides and floods.
So we drove along the Hallstättler See to find a nice lay-by with views over the lake, for a hot soup lunch in Eileen. We followed the main road through Bad Goisern and Bad Ischl, unfortunately we missed Bad Aussee and I really thought we should have gone there…! Just after 3pm we checked in to a campsite with perhaps the longest name so far: Romantik Camp Wolfgangsee Lindenstrand, which sits right next to St Wolfgang See, somewhere between St Gilgen and Strobl. Sadly all the lake front pitches were taken, but we got a spot in the second row and we have nice views through the gaps to the lake and across to Ried.
It rained on and off all evening and all night, and was still raining when we nipped over to the shower block in the morning. The campsite seemed a very different place from the afternoon before, when people were sunbathing outside their vans and swimming in the lake. The clouds hung around all morning and even the ducks hunkered down on the grass bank under a tree.
Rodney had cooked up a huge breakfast of ‘bacon’, eggs, tomatoes, potatoes and fried bread, so we weren’t in the mood for any lunch and by 1pm Mr Ants-In-His-Pants needed to go somewhere. So the decision was made to put the raincoats in the rucksack and stroll along the lake towards Strobl. We walked for an hour, hardly seeing the lake and for a large part of the walk we seemed to be either walking beside campsites, or through them. We stopped at Uberfuhr and sat outside a pizzeria pub (…?!!!) and ate a plate of apfelstrudel served with chocolate sauce; different, but delicious. Then with blue patches starting to appear in the sky, we turned back towards Schwand, taking a different route through the woods. Showers caught us halfway and then the sun actually came out. The caravan between the lake and us had left and we now had a lovely view of the lake, so we sat outside in the sunshine for a while watching a storm move up the lake towards us. Then thunder, lightning and a heavy downpour meant dinner inside again, but we whipped it up early and then settled in to watch ‘The Quiet American’ before bed.
We started our third day sitting by the Wolfgangsee and decided that we better go and see St Wolfgang. So with the clouds hanging low over the lake, we cycled round to St Gilgen and had a wander around the village for a while. We then locked up the bikes next to the ferry wharf and boarded the midday boat to Sankt Wolfgang. It was a lovely cruise down the lake, with the sun playing hide-and-seek behind the clouds, and we sat up top, at the rear of the boat, along with a group of Japanese tourists who were handing out snacks. They were very friendly and I ended up with a tasty sweet rice cracker and then had to decline a large chocolate bar, well I didn’t want to look like a scavenger…..! Rodney ordered a hot chocolate on board, which involved putting a long narrow bar of chocolate into a tall glass of hot milk and he then had to stir it like crazy for five minutes to get it to melt. It seemed like hard work for a drink, but it tasted okay, though nothing like as good as the Italian ones.
At St Wolfgang, we roamed around the streets, from the bottom to the top and back down to the bottom again; then we managed to get a seat right over the water at the Weissen Röessl Seerestaurant (The White Horse Inn). Both of our meals arrived with creamy sauces and then we both had desserts which again involved cream; I wonder if there are a lot of heart surgeons in Austria, because it’s hard to get anything to eat that doesn’t include cream. While eating our heart-stopping lunch, Rodney got a message to say that the Lions had beaten the Aussies, so he was in a perky mood for the rest of the day.
After a bit more of a stroll, we boarded the 4pm boat back to St Gilgen and watched all the activity on the water. There was a paddle steamer, rowers, speedboats, swimmers, paddle boarders, electric boats, a water skier, kayakers, pedalos, fishermen in their tinnies, the ferries, but we had not seen a single yacht all day. We thought it must be due to the lack of wind, then as we approached St Gilgen we spotted twenty tiny sailboats clustered, unmoving, in the middle of the lake and then we watched as two motor boats towed them back to shore; there was absolutely no breeze at all today.
We cycled back to the campsite from St Gilgen and arrived in time for me to take my chair down to the lakeside for half an hour of reading in the sunshine. I love watching the swans when they come ashore and it was fun watching them waddle past us across the grass, following the children who have bread in their hands, in a ‘Pied Piper’ style. Sometimes the swans are taller than the kiddies; which seems a bit scary, but we haven’t seen any tears yet.
We’re now at our furthest point east and tomorrow we will start heading west towards England. We’re aiming for a couple of nights in Salzburg, if we can get in to the campsite there, and then we’ll head on to Germany.
