A Day In Innsbruck

We enjoyed a bit of a lie-in this morning, with no rush to get on the bikes. Having two nights in one place feels like a luxury after a week of packing every morning. We ended up sitting with Jane and Rutherford for breakfast and making plans to have dinner together before we went our separate ways tomorrow.

Luke and I didn’t have set plans so we walked towards the old town along the river and our first stop was a charity shop that was selling a wide range of items including second hand dirndls, which I’ve not seen anywhere else before.

The quality of the clothing was excellent and Luke ended up buying a jacket* and I was slightly annoyed to find an entire display of just the thing I had looked for in London:

Champagne glasses! Lea likes to drink her sparkling wine out of a nice glass and our Camden flat only had three (not very nice) wine glasses and not one flute, so every time I passed an op shop I looked for a cheap one, to no avail. Apparently they were all in Innsbruck.

Then we walked around the streets and quickly found the main** attraction, the golden roof. Don’t ask me why it’s so famous, it’s so boring I couldn’t be bothered even looking up why it’s so well known.

Here’s a slightly closer photo using a technique I saw on instagram and was able to use thanks to the first real rain of my trip causing some puddles to form. Now I get a photo with TWO golden roofs. What could be more thrilling than that?

We walked around the main mall and back streets of the old town, which were charming.

The buildings were lovely colours and some were very ornate.

Traditional painting of the wine making process.

The old part of town was only about six streets but they had a lot of interesting shops. One sold the most elaborate glasses I’ve ever seen.

This is not a great photo but you get a bit of an idea.

We stopped at a cafe with large umbrellas to have a drink as the rain started, and watch all the very fashionably dresses people go by. Not quite as fancy as Zürich but lots of interesting styles.

The rain and sun alternated every half hour.

More walking through the side streets and looking in some of the shops.

We moved to the riverside and had some lunch – nachos with bbq sauce and some garnish that I think is tiny tomatoes but I’m really not sure!

They weren’t at all spicy… but if anyone knows for sure please tell me!

After another hot chocolate (they really are very fluffy and delicious!) we headed back to the hotel for an undeserved rest.

On the way home we walked through a local market hall that had local vendors with stalls. We bought a bag of fried apple for the train trip tomorrow.

More marvellous looking strawberries.

White asparagus is a big thing here at the moment.

During our walk around town we had found a place for dinner, the Stiftskeller Inn. It had a very ‘Munich beer hall’ atmosphere and seemed to be quite popular.

Luke and I got there a bit early to secure a table then Jane and Rutherford arrived not long after. We had a lovely evening swapping travel stories and eating some very traditional Austrian food.

I had an enormous salad covered in bacon.

Luke had Apple strudel and custard for dessert and I had icecream.

We all walked back to the hotel together and said our farewells, they are off on another section of cycling, this time to Vienna.

Tomorrow we catch the train to Hallstatt, which hopefully lives up to its postcard-perfect reputation!

15Jun2023

Eurobike Tour: Day 6: Imst to Innsbruck

by Miss Penny Black

I’ve taken a lot more photos of tractors than I anticipated. I didn’t even mean to take this one, it just rolled into the shot.

Today was going to be our longest day yet (65km) and initially I’d been dreading it as the road surfaces of the first few days had been steep and gravel. However, yesterday was mostly asphalt and it seemed like the closer we got to Innsbruck, the better the road would be. Being well stocked with medication to combat itchy eyes made me feel more confident too. If I can be indelicate, the previous day had also not been quite as torturous in the seat, so that was a bonus too.

After a massive ten hours of sleep (for me anyway) we got down to breakfast at about 7am. Breakfast at this hotel started at 6:30am, the previous hotel was 8am. There really should be a standardisation of breakfast hours in hotels and when I am elected president of the world it will be one of my first ten new laws*.

Jane and Rutherford sat next to us at breakfast and I am proud to say I won the wordle challenge for the day (fastest *and* fewest guesses). I forgot to post the photo I took of the four of us the previous day so here it is.

Right after our guardian angels pointed us to the nearest pharmacy.

This hotel had champagne on offer with the breakfast buffet but since 90% of the clientele were about to mount up for a day of cycling, I can’t imagine much of it was drunk.

Farewell, Hotel Neuner, your meals were excellent and not eye-wateringly priced.

Our hotel was right by the bike trail and so it was a matter of moments to be on our bikes and heading out of town. There were a few short, steep hills to begin with, then a lovely section of dappled forest riding.

The majority of the day was spent going between 20 and 35kph and so we made it to Innsbruck a bit before 3pm. Here’s a few sights from the trail.

We rode alongside this river most of the day.

A small herd of cows blocked the road and we looked at them for a short while until a guy on a bike came towards them from the other direction and shouted at them and pushed them out of the way. Not a tactic I would’ve tried!

The valley floor was very flat and mostly farmland.

While he loved the forest sections and some of the farmland with all its vegetation, Luke said it was the most boring day, scenery-wise. I felt it was a relief not to have a sheer drop right next to me at any point.

Luke stopped by Innsbruck airport but sadly no planes flew low overhead. Behind us was the local beach – giant pebbles and freezing cold water.

We stopped in Innsbruck to check how far away our hotel was and it just so happened to be right across the road from the point at which we’d stopped. The tour app directs you to the middle of town and we hadn’t thought about precisely where the hotel was. Lucky we checked!

The hotel is called ‘Rufi’s’ which doesn’t translate well into English. The guy at the front desk was lovely and we put away our bikes then availed ourselves of our complementary drinks.

So there you go, we finished our bike tour from St Moritz to Innsbruck. Approximately 250km across two countries. The route had been rated ‘moderate’ but we’d thought that having e-bikes would compensate for our lack of fitness or experience. Although we made it, I wouldn’t recommend this strategy to anyone else! It was more mentally draining than physically problematic for me, I wasn’t expecting it to be quite so scary – although the worst part was the detour on day 3.

In summary!

The best bits were:

The views

The weather

The public pool/spa at Zernez

The local food

The very polite and patient drivers in Austria and Switzerland

The decent route signage

The excellent roadside amenities, in particular the frequent public fountains with pure spring drinking water

The worst aspects were:

The bikes were for city riding, not gravel, the tyres were awful for the conditions

The complete lack of support from Eurobikes and the fact that ‘the natural adventure company’ was just another name for a company we’d actively been trying to avoid

The way hotels did not cater for warm nights by offering a sheet or light blanket, let alone a fan or aircon

The flies – they are everywhere, including indoors

The atrocious smell of manure for about 50% of the ride

The poor performance of the two apps and that day 5 on the app did not allow any route guidance

So, how much did it cost? The seven nights of accommodation plus breakfast, e-bike hire and bag transfers was $5,422K AUD for both of us. Most of the hotels were around $300 to $400 a night ($350×7 = $2450). We paid extra for electric bikes but I shudder to think what the trip would’ve been like without them.

While it is a lot for a week’s travel, this is a very expensive part of the world and the views are tremendous. The entire route has views of snow-capped jagged mountains and fields of flowers. The most scenic part was day 4, between Ardez and Ftan. A cheaper and easier way to enjoy the sights would be to use the local bus system to get about and walk between some of the most picturesque places.

We saved a bit of money by eating large breakfasts, skipping lunch and buying most of our snacks from the supermarket.

We ate our way through several packets of these biscuits over the course of the week.

Anyhow, on to a relaxing day in Innsbruck before catching the train to Hallstatt!

* I’m having a really hard time deciding on my other nine but they will definitely include a standardisation of electrical sockets and better pillows for Europeans.

15Jun2023

Eurobike Tour: Day 5: Ried to Imst

by Miss Penny Black

After our usual ‘stuff ourselves to the brim’ breakfast we hit the road. I took my strongest hayfever meds and didn’t suffer too badly in the morning. At about 12pm we cycled through Landeck, a larger town than any we’d seen so far.

We cycled past Jane and Rutherford, who stopped for a chat and said they’d just been to a chemist! So I went in and bought two replacement bottles of nasal spray and two bottles of eye drops, which now brings my total quantity of hay fever meds to seven.

We stopped at a cafe for a drink which turned out to be more like a dessert – a very ice cream heavy iced chocolate and iced coffee. They came with three long wafers to scoop up the icecream. Delicious!

Heading out of Landeck was a bit of road riding, then gravel, then a lovely tarmac bike path.

Not far out of Landeck we saw this interesting ruin. Imagine living up there! You certainly wouldn’t be popular with the postman.

Lots of horses around, particularly palominos.

We stopped in a little village to refill our soft water bottles and found this curious religious statue. Is it Mary or Eve? Or is this a commentary on how all the women in the bible are either mothers or of ill repute?

A little further along we decided to stop at what looked like a charming little cafe.

It seemed small but was like the tardis as we went in.

Hundreds of seats and a dozen different shops. From the other side it was clearly a Highway service station. We ended up buying ice cream and sitting outside. Coconut for me, caramel for Luke.

The day’s ride was pretty easy compared to the previous days and, apart from a wrong turn down an extremely low and creepy (probably haunted) tunnel, we made it to our hotel without too many worries.

The path was a lot easier in every way and so we made pretty good time, arriving around 3pm.

Time for a drink at the restaurant.

Most of our discussion over drinks revolved around the excessive number of flies in Switzerland and Austria and the complete lack of flyscreens. No matter where you sit they are landing on your plate and no one else seems terribly bothered by them.

We ended up having dinner at 6, knudels (mac and cheese) and salad for me, cordon Bleu and chips for Luke. mine had dried caramelised onions on top, which I will have to try at home because it was a great combo.

Prices continue to become more reasonable the further we get from St Moritz

I’d like to say we went out partying but I was asleep by 7pm and didn’t wake up until after 5am. I think the relief of having enough medication to make the trip enjoyable was such a great weight of my mind I could properly relax.

Our room at the hotel was nice too, spacious with a balcony lined with purple petunias.

Poor Luke was up until 11 playing games with his headphones in.

Tomorrow our last but longest day at 65km.

13Jun2023

Euro Bike Tour: Day 4: Scuol to Prutz (Crossing to Austria)

by Miss Penny Black

We left the hotel at about 10 after a bit of drama with my phone and Three, the company I got my phone SIM from. Danny, my friend in Northern Ireland (with whom I did the Camino) had been very kindly helping me out with renewing my phone plan (the money has to be paid from a UK account) but the credit he’d added had somehow disappeared while I’d been asleep – Luke thought maybe the hotel wifi had dropped out and apps had been updating. Luke used their online chat to fix it and the company renewed the plan for a month with unlimited data.

You just don’t realise how important internet access is until you don’t have it. We only have one UK phone number between us and it’s on my phone – something to rectify for next time. The delay made me feel a bit anxious as this was our longest day of cycling yet.

On the way out of Scuol was a very scenic bridge and no cars allowed, which makes any path more pleasant to ride!

So picturesque.

Snow melt makes the rivers such an unusual colour with all the minerals washed down from the mountains.

I didn’t take a lot of photos today. Switzerland has experienced really bad storms and some landslides. Trails that were probably fairly smooth a couple of weeks ago were very potholed and rough. Or maybe they were always like that. The day before we had been detoured due to a big landslide.

There were several parts of the ride early on where railings seemed to be missing or edges were more precipitous than they should be. I really don’t like coming down steep and winding gravel roads that have a sharp turn at the bottom and no railing or fence. It made me very tense and I’m surprised, after so much white-knuckled riding today that my arms and shoulders aren’t sore.

The other thing that was making me worried was that my most powerful and fast-acting hayfever medication is getting very low as the bottle has leaked a bit. I’d tried taking it in two half doses the day before with middling success but today I thought I’d wait until I felt the symptoms before I took it. With the wind in my face and a great deal of pollen in the air it didn’t take long for my eyes to become extremely itchy and feel swollen.

We stopped in a tiny hamlet and I felt really overwhelmed by the terrain and how my face felt. It was hard to see with such itchy red eyes and I had a bit of a cry. Luke tried calling the Eurobike help line to see if the bag transport vehicle was anywhere near us. It took them half an hour to get back to us and then they said no, the driver’s van was too full to pick us up.

We had deliberately booked through a company called Natural Adventures in order to avoid Eurobikes as their reviews weren’t good. It turned out that Natural Adventures use Eurobikes anyhow and that their promises of support to riders did not extend to picking us up, knowing anything about local transport services, connecting us to taxis etc or offering any help whatsoever.

After being the very definition of useless, the person at the other end had the temerity to say ‘have a nice day,’ and I replied with ‘unlikely,’ and hung up in a rage.

Since there was nothing for it, I took some of the remaining fast-acting hayfever meds, waited a bit and then kept going.

The next part of the path was pretty dreadful (short, steep, very rocky climbs and narrow paths next to steep edges) but eventually became a decent road which then turned into us riding on the side of a highway.

Initially we were on a bike path next to the highway but after some roadworks the bike lane disappeared and it was just us and cars and trucks all using the same lane. Fortunately due to the roadworks the traffic was slow and Swiss/Austrian drivers all moved over and were very polite. I didn’t feel in any danger and there were other cyclists on the road.

We had to ride through several tunnels. Partway through one I could see what I initially thought was my hair curling around the front of my hat, which was weird because I had put my hair in braids that morning. No, it dawned on me, it wasn’t hair, it was the legs of a huge beetle reaching under the brim of my hat right in front of my face. It was big enough for me to hear the thump as it hit the road when I brushed it off. Ick.

The highway riding was very fast (for us) – we rode between 30 and 40 kph for quite a while and made up for all the time wasted by the call to Eurobikes (world’s worst bike company?). After the highway the rest of the ride was along pretty quiet and well-sealed country roads through small villages until we reached our hotel.

Today’s ride was about 50km. Tomorrow is more like 35km and hopefully the high quality roads continue as we get closer to Innsbruck. The final day is 65km but if my hayfever is worse there’s a train line along that stretch so we can cut some of it out if needed.

Luke has been really supportive and kind about all my suffering and lets me set the pace and take rests when I need them. Technically I guess this is our honeymoon holiday since we’re on our own for a stretch and, even though it hasn’t been perfect, having Luke be so considerate with my challenges and severe discomfort at points has really reminded me what a wonderful human being he is and how lucky I am to have him.

Our hotel for the evening was on a busy road and didn’t look super fancy but the staff were really lovely and our room was a good size as well as having an enclosed balcony.

We ate dinner in the hotel restaurant, where the food was easily half the price it would’ve been in St Moritz. We had pork schnitzels with cranberry sauce (a great combination) and they served wine in a 240ml carafe for 6€, which cheered me up even more.

We finished the evening drinking our duty free gin and watching from our balcony as the clouds changed colour and listening to music inspired by the restaurant’s playlist of 20 year old trance classics.

12Jun2023

Eurobike Tour: Day 3: Zernez to Scoul

by Miss Penny Black

I’d like to say we slept well but for no good reason that I can think of, the church in Zernez rings the bells on the hour 24 hours a day. I definitely heard the 11pm, midnight, 2am and 4am bells. Also the pillows were terrible, which we are coming to expect. Complain complain! I know, but travel isn’t all fun and I think the bad bits are often more memorable or notable.

Anyhow, breakfast was not newsworthy at all (basic Scandinavian breakfast of cold meats, cheeses, yogurt etc), apart from seeing Jane and Rutherford in the breakfast room and learning that they too are Wordle players.

Goodbye Zernez, with your excellent pool and your terrible church.

The church bells rang for 9am just as we cycled out of Zernez.

The morning’s ride began with gravel, some steep ups and downs that were made much easier with the e-bikes. Rutherford had pointed out that all the gravel would be much easier going if we’d had better tyres and I couldn’t help thinking about this as I juddered along. It was nowhere near as bad as the previous day though.

We saw our first covered bridges, which were difficult to photograph in the bright sunlight.

Initially our ride was fairly low in the valley and close to the river.

We rode through very picturesque little villages and along quiet roads. Usually I have to angle my camera to get shots without people, but that hasn’t been a problem since we left Zürich – the Engardin valley seems almost deserted. There’s the Swiss version of the Tour de France next weekend – for those who find the original too easy perhaps? So it will no doubt get busier soon. We’re very lucky to have the paths and tracks almost to ourselves.

Halfway through the morning we were very much not on the valley floor but halfway up the side. In most places there were no rails or fences and having to ride on the right side and close to the edge made me quite anxious. It’s very strange to be somewhere so beautiful and dramatic but not be able to look at it without stopping.

Of course we did stop quite frequently to take photos, and only having to travel 30km meant we didn’t have far to go. I was glad of the early start though as my hayfever wasn’t great and my eyes were watering quite a bit.

The third last village we went through, Ardez, was so beautiful! The houses were very traditional and had some amazing art painted on them that seemed very Gaelic to me.

The whole town was lovely, if completely silent. Switzerland has frequently reminded me of Japan and the quietness is another of those attributes. The others are the proliferation of natural springs, wood-based architecture and high prices. Both also suffer from frequent and devastating natural disasters (earthquakes and avalanches) as well as warmongering neighbours. Also both are places where you’ll regularly see everyday people in traditional costume. The more I think about it, the more similarities there are!

The church was perhaps the most plain building in the place.

The best part of the day was between the third and second last villages. It was a pristine stretch of asphalt that didn’t allow motorised vehicles. Only bikes and hikers! It also had a barrier between us and the vertical drop down the side most of the time so I could relax a little.

We stopped at a cafe at the second last village and had a drink, trying to delay our arrival at the hotel until a reasonable hour.

Cafe in Ftan and no, I do not know how to pronounce it.

The last stretch was great quality road but steep hairpin bends and more traffic, including a number of trucks. I sat on my brakes the whole way down – sitting on the right again meant being on the edge of a drop. I didn’t love it (I hated it) but the hotel wasn’t far from the end of the descent.

The hotel was lovely, the staff were friendly, the immediate surrounds smelled like a mound of freshly-produced cow manure. Not a small amount of manure either, like a herd of a thousand cows had all gathered here to poop for a month. Still, the place did have an indoor pool.

But first, our room. It was magnificent.

If you’ve been to my house or followed our renovations, you’ll know how much I love wood panelling.

The quilts (you always get one each) were in a heart shape! Aww!

We even had a little lounge area. The views from the windows were excellent too.

It was delightful. Also we had places to plug in all our devices, which we hadn’t in the last hotel. We did some hand washing of undies then headed to the hotel’s pool.

We had it to ourselves for most of the time and it was 27 degrees, very nice!

I wasn’t keen to go outside in the late afternoon and reignite my hayfever (also… manure smell) so Luke went for a walk while I had a rest. He discovered that everything was downhill from the hotel, which made walking back a bit exhausting.

We had dinner booked in the hotel at 7. I had carbonara but Luke had schnitzel, which he’d been looking forward to since we got to Switzerland. And it was only $70 AUD (ouch) but cheaper than Zürich prices and a very generous serve.