European Tour!

The View over
"No Mans Land"


Just back from a Road trip across Europe, set off for France via the euro tunnel, arrived to meet a 4 hour delay!, so we arrived in the Somme region of France a little later than expected.

We spent a day visiting "No Mans Land" and dozens of memorials and a couple of museums on the first world, very interesting and moving. On Sunday we hit the road again and made our way down and across to Germany, to Heidelberg arriving again late afternoon.

On the evening we Popped into the town in the evening to stretch legs get our bearings and get something to eat.
The next day we visited the Castle which seemed to be the High spot of the town, in the afternoon we took a boat trip down the river, it lasted about 1.1/2hrs very pleasant and interesting, had a bite to eat then back to the Hotel to watch the football along with the locals and other visitors.
















Tuesday morning we hit the road again, this time driving down to Italy, to stay on the banks of Lake Maggiore, It had started to rain by now, so having planned to relax and sit in the sun, take a boat trip on the lake we were a little disappointed. On Wednesday as it was still raining, so we decided to drive to Milan, It poured all day, We visited the Cathedral and the Opera house and museum, very impressive. On Thursday we drove down and around part of Lake Maggiore onto a smaller lake, Lake Orta which we found was more tranquil and relaxing than Maggiore, we sat beside it and read our books for a while taking advantage of the break in the rain, On Friday the Sun blessed us, so we were off for our boat trip to the Islands on Lake Maggiore, we had a glorious day, very relaxing, both Islands were small and beautiful, the bigger of the two had a palace and gardens that you could go into, (for a fee) these gardens were terraced and quite tropical.






On Saturday we were on the road again to driving to Austria, "Bad Gastein" an Alpine village which is a ski resort in the winter months and a spa town with its thermal waters, it's about 930m above sea level, perched on the side of a hill, very pretty, it has a river/come waterfall right through the middle of it. Unfortunately the rain was still with us, and because of our height there was plenty of low cloud. On Sunday we drove to Salzburg, visiting the castle. Tuesday we drove and visited Zell am See, took a walk by the lake, then onto Kaprun, we went for a walk above Kaprun, tried to follow a little map from the tourist office, but it wasn't clear at one point so we took the wrong turn and ended up a little "off piste", we ended up coming down steep banks following the river into the valley, a little hairy in places but we managed to laugh about it.

Wednesday and Thursday the Sun shone all day, we made for the hills at "Sport Gastein" which is about 2000m above sea level, it was beautiful, there was cows with their cow bells everywhere, they randomly wear different size bells and as they move their heads to eat they ring out from all over. On the very tops it still had snow, which meant on our climb up we were walking in melting snow, seemed very strange with the sun shining as well.

On Friday we started our mammoth drive back, Friday we drove for about 7 hours and 600 odd miles, we stayed the night in Aachen which is on the Belgium/Germany border, this left us about 3 hours the next morning to Calais, then another 3 hours from Dover to Bristol. We were both a little tired but pleased to be back home.
All in all a very enjoyable holiday, I wasn't looking forward to driving on the Autobahns but it wasn't as bad as I had imagined, and I wouldn't think twice about doing it again, I was thankful for Derek's automatic car as I'm sure this made for a more relaxing drive than a manual car, a total of about 2300 miles!.