Austria, 7th – 12th June 2016
Lake Zell |
In the winter Zell am See is a big ski resort, but out of season there are still plenty of reasons to visit. It’s got a great location, with the town looking out over the lake and surrounded by snow-capped mountains. There are plenty of hiking trails and cycle routes for all abilities, and you can pick up free comprehensive booklets for both, complete with a map from the tourist office. The food menus all looked cheap; Austria is one of the richer countries in Europe, and yet we were often seeing pizzas and similar at €6-7 a head, which comes as sweet relief after Switzerland. We got the bikes out and went on a lakeside cycle, which is around 8 miles making a loop around and mostly on cycle paths. The lake was very calm and peaceful with very little activity going on, but on a windy day would be a great base for windsurfing. I imagine if we were looking for a place for a week’s holiday of activity in the future, we could quite easily check into one of the campsites here and enjoy the area.
As it was such a nice location we decided to spend a second night here, both to relax and to get some internet jobs out of the way utilising the free WiFi which we’ve not had for months. Matt tracked down his last CV in old emails to start getting that up to date, as we’ll have to start making job applications before too long, and did some research into where to go in Austria. I made some headway in updating several months’ worth of stopovers on our journey route map (and yet after hours of updating we are still over a month behind!). We also finally bought the CamperContact app and downloaded the points for the relevant country's after using the website version for so long, so that we’ve got a backup resource in case we can’t get mobile internet so easily after Austria. Our initial impressions are that it’s a poorly executed app that’s more awkward to use than it should be, but we’ll post our thoughts on whether we think it’s a worthwhile purchase after we’ve had a few weeks to play with it.
As a country Austria has a great network for cycling, and we’ve got more use out of our bikes in the brief time we’ve been here and in Germany than we’ve had in months. This trend continued at Altenmarkt as it is a point on the R7 cycle route, a 263km long path starting in the Salzburg region and heading east. As a town Altenmarkt and the nearby Radstadt didn’t have much to see of note, but the area did make good biking territory. We got an hour’s worth of cycling in before the skies threatened us with rain. I can only hope that perhaps all this exercise might cancel out the gelato we’ve been gorging on recently.
We’d toyed with the idea of going to Salzburg on Thursday, but it was dull and drizzling in the morning and the forecast looked no better for the coming week, which isn’t ideal for traipsing around a big city. The campsites aren’t too cheap at about €35/night and we’d have been paying for buses on top as it was too rainy for cycling and too far for walking, so we decided we’d leave it as under the current conditions we wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much as we should, and we still had two other cities to see in Austria.
Motorhome parking at Bad Ischl |
Lake Hallstattersee |
Stellplatz at Liezen |
We had an early start in the morning and paid for our parking just before 7am, before it started charging us for another day. Pulling into a layby overlooking Lake Hallstattersee, we ate our breakfasts with views of the low clouds over the water and pondered where to go next. After all but one day of paid stopovers we were going to be passing through the town Liezen which had the first free stellplatz we’ve found in Austria, so decided to go there (GPS: 47.56506 14.23348). Officially the space is for three vans, but a fourth van arrived in the evening and seemed to slot in fairly comfortably.
As a town, Liezen was the least interesting place we’ve seen in Austria so far. There’s nothing wrong with the place, but it was definitely a working town. On the positive side, it did have the first Lidl we’ve seen since Zell am See. There were walking trails nearby and it was also another point on the R7 cycle route, which was right on our doorstep from the stellplatz, so after exhausting the few sights in town and carrying a food haul from Lidl home, out came the bikes for a 22km ride, mainly along dirt and gravel tracks through fields on what turned into a nice warm sunny day.
Our next main point of call was in Graz, some 160-odd kilometres south. In Austria, there are three different kinds of toll: the first is vignette roads, which is needed for all motorways and expressway dual-carriageways (“A” and “S” roads) across the country and requires a windscreen sticker purchased at most fuel stations. In addition to this, there are some sections on the vignette roads, mainly tunnels, which incur an additional charge via toll booths when you get to them. The third type is toll charges on some of the alpine mountain passes, such as the Grossglockner. The vignette sections are marked by a special vignette sign at the entrances to the roads, and the other toll sections are marked with a “Peage” notice on road signs. As the eastern side of the country we were going into has a much bigger network of motorways and it would shave considerable time driving and avoid small twisty roads, we decided the vignette was a worthwhile expense. We called at a fuel station before leaving Liezen, where it was simply a case of asking for a vignette inside (€8.80 for 10 days) and then sticking it to the windscreen. For vehicles over 3.5T there’s a different system with an electronic GO-Box required.
We resolved that we weren’t going to let the skies deter our plans for Graz, so on Sunday morning it was off to the big city. If you want to stay overnight in Graz, there is a nice-sounding commercial stellplatz on the outskirts for €21, or if you want to be a bit closer to the city centre there is also a €12 stellplatz at a motorhome dealership. The former was a bit far away from the centre and the latter is closed at weekends, so we decided to try our luck at day parking. Parking in Graz is divided into a blue zone and a green zone, with the blue zone closer to the city centre having a 3hr time limit and being a bit pricier than the green zone, but these restrictions only apply during working hours (Monday to Friday daytime and Saturday mornings). As it was a Sunday we investigated the blue zone and struck lucky finding a parking spot a few minutes’ walk from the main centre that had been closed all weekend for an event the day before but the restriction ended within a few minutes of our arrival.
Graz is the second biggest city in Austria, with a big university population and a large network of trams. It was perhaps a bit quieter than usual being a Sunday, although it’s debateable whether that’s necessarily a bad thing. We got a map from the tourist office and had a few hours wandering around the main areas. There’s a hilled castle area with views out over the city, which is reachable by a 260 step ascent known as the Kriegssteig (war steps), built by Russian prisoners during World War I. In terms of attractiveness Innsbruck was perhaps a little bit prettier, but Graz is still a very nice place to visit with lots of tall impressive old buildings and more of a big city feel.
|
|
|
|
- Jo
P.S. We've now added pictures of the upside down house to the last post which you can see here, we forgot before as they were on Matt's phone instead of the camera!
Another fantastic blog thank you ☺
ReplyDelete