Innsbruck - Lucerne

Hi All,

Sorry it's been a while between posts, the last week has had a hectic schedule with some patchy wifi connections in between and there hasn't been a whole lot time or inclination for updating until now. Rest assured we're both alive and well.

So from a fairly idyllic life away from the tour group in Venice we rejoined the group and headed to Austria. The changes in the landscape are very pronounced when you head to the very north of Italy towards the border, taking the Brenner Pass. The mountains are just sensational and only get better once you cross the border into Austria.

Innsbruck is a pretty little city in the areas around the old part of the city, however it doesn't have a patch on Vienna or Salzburg which disappointingly were cut from this tour this year. Having briefly seen both of these cities before I was disappointed that Nicky didn't get to see them.

We really only spent a couple of hours here, just enough time to eat Schnitzel, Strudel and have Schnapps and take a few photos which at this stage I can't share with you because we've been having some wifi trouble so I can't transfer them to my iPad for now. I'll upload some when we get an opportunity.

We spent the night at Innsbruck which was at a ski resort though of course there was only snow at the very tops of the mountains. One of the guys on our tour bothered to cart a guitar around with him so we took turns playing and singing to keep ourselves amused. Good fun.

We pushed on the next day heading to Switzerland, first passing through Lichtenstein where I had yet another Schnitzel and Nicky had one of the best veggie burgers ever. A slightly random place to find one.

As we continued north the landscape just got better and better, the mountains got more..mountainous, increasing in scale and beauty. This part of the world is just gorgeous.

We arrived in Lucerne eventually and spent a bit of time orientating ourselves. There are swans everywhere in Lake Lucerne and they are very human-friendly as obviously despite all the signs, people feed them.

Lucerne is a beautiful city, I was surprised to learn that it has quite a large Thai population there. Though apparently the cost of a good Thai curry will set you back about 40 Swiss franks. Switzerland is apparently the most expensive country in Europe to live, though I will argue Venice was pretty comparable in expense and the food, while a completely different cuisine, was not at the same level of quality.

Our good luck with the weather unfortunately wore off when we headed north. It wasn't so bad the first day in Lucerne, we did a lake cruise which was cool and it was mostly just overcast with a bit of drizzle. The following morning when we went up on a cable car (which had an open top) to the top of one of the mountains the weather was rally not with us and unfortunately when we got to the top of the mountain it was about 5 degrees and we couldn't see through the fog which was thicker than pea soup. We bought a fridge magnet though.

We spent the afternoon in town and naturally bought a couple of watches. We fished in the shallow end of THATparticular pond. For our last evening we went to a folklore dinner and show. That was a load of fun, we had cheese fondue, litres of beer, some other stuff to eat and then the show began.

I can just say that the winters are clearly very long in Switzerland and the people clearly get bored and start deciding which household objects they can make instruments out of. At one point a guy was dancing around hitting a broom with a stick, another time there was some wooden spoons going and then a lady was using some partially filled glass bottles as some sort of improvised xylophone. I asked Nicky what kind of noise she thought they would get out of a toilet brush.

They also had some more normal types of instruments, largely accordions and various types of horns including some massive 10ft long horns which had a name I can't recall, but I'll call it the Big Kahuna. They got people up on stage to have a go blowing that massive horn....all the people at our table decided to volunteer me which I was thrilled about. Knowing all the inevitable jokes I'm just going to say this anyway - I got up on stage and blew that big horn as good as I could. The locals were impressed with my technique. The large Swiss guy seemed satisfied. Let the jokes begin!

We were all singing and making a lot of noise in the bus on the way home so naturally when we got back to the hotel we all went straight to the bar and ordered more drinks. I didn't enjoy getting up at 6:30 the next morning and I wasn't the only quiet one at breakfast.

I'm sorry there's no photos but I'll publish some in this post within the next day or so once I have the opportunity.

From here we pushed on to Germany, more on that in a bit!

Cheers,

Brandon.