1st  July 2012

Steve: The rest of the trip up through Slovenia was a bit of a lazy day, we had become so relaxed overnight that we found ourselves very chilled and lazy when it came time to leave the Inn, we also stood chatting to the owners son (who spoke perfect English) for about 40 mins before we eventually wandered up the road.

Today was another of Debs ‘pin sticking’ locations at Wargrain, Austria, where she had found a small Guest House that also runs a café in the ski season.
However, such was our delay that we needed to do the rest of the trip to our destination on the motorway, but what a beautiful trip.. The motorway runs out of Slovenia through the mountains with glorious views only interrupted by the Austrian border crossing, a brief delay and even more brief passport viewing and we were through, just in time to purchase another vignette (we’re getting quite a collection here) before setting off once again, but we were in for a bit of a surprise..
The Slovenian vignette was a one-off payment that covered all motorways and major roads, but having bought an 8 day vignette at the Austrian border we were then hit by tolls on the approach to the major tunnels, this was a bit of a problem for us because we had so little cash Euro with us. Why don’t they just include everything in the one payment?

On to better things -

Debs, being an avid ski-jumping enthusiast, was overjoyed to see the jump at Villache from the motorway - this event necessitated an abrupt departure from the route just for a photo-shoot, although the promised coffee and cake didn’t happen as it was a Sunday and we just couldn’t find anywhere open..


Eventually Dolly managed to get us to Wagrain, a wonderful place with excellent facilities, surrounded by mountains and just picture-book perfect.

Victoria, our hostess, was a happy and smiling young lady who just couldn’t do enough for us, including a free beer from her own stock ‘cos I looked in need!

We ate that night down in the local village and because we had just arrived in Austria chose the local dish Weiner schnitzel, for those that may not know it’s a stuffed veal fillet coated in breadcrumbs, it came about the size of a large cod fillet with chips and we ate it all!

Then off for a good nights sleep, but the following morning Debs spied a chair lift up the mountain and we were off.. It seemed to go on forever, climbing up into the clouds until we finally came to a stop and I stumbled gratefully off - I’m not good with heights!






The sun shone, the terrain was reasonably flat, and the coffee and huge chunks of chocolate cake were most acceptable.

Seriously chilled man...

After about an hour of admiring the views and being very aware of having eaten far too much cake we made our way back down and packed for our next leg of the trip, although I could have happily stayed there for the next week!