The nights may be getting a little cooler but the sunshine had returned and the day was sunny and warm as we drove into Belgium. The only places we wanted to see in Belgium were Ypres (Ieper) and Passendale, being of specific importance to New Zealand and other Commonwealth countries as a major battlefield during the First World War. We arrived at Ypres at about 2pm and drove straight in to the city centre through the Menin Gate and managed to find parking really easily. (Probably as the city is not very big - approx. pop. 35000) Ypres was made famous [View Full Entry]

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From Heli’s place we drove back up towards Salzburg then turned left into Germany, unfortunately we did not fill up before crossing the border because petrol was 10c dearer here. Our route was to take us all the way along the A8 through Munich, past Stuttgart and through Karlsruhe along the southern part of Germany and into The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The traffic on the autobahn was quite heavy and the number of trucks was incredible. Dobby cruised along at a steady 110 quite happily passing the trucks, and it was impossible for anyone to do more than around 130 [View Full Entry]

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It was about 7.30pm when we drove back into Austria and the difference in the countryside and towns was instantly noticeable. Everything looked tidier and more organized, the towns had footpaths and the shops didn’t have bars. There was no litter in the streets and the houses looked loved - it felt good to be back. We found a campsite on the map at a little town called Jennersdorf which was about 20km from the Hungarian border and 10km from the Slovinian border. The campsite was worth a mention because it was the cleanest and best maintained place we have [View Full Entry]

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After breakfast we hit the road south again, we were only about 20km from the Hungarian border but it was about another 250km to Budapest if we wanted to go that far today. The roads were pretty good despite the sections that had big grooves caused by the many trucks plying this route and we made good progress without having to use the motorways. It was another hot and sunny day and we were travelling through rolling hills and big fields of yellow and green and brown, it all looked neat and tidy. We took a short detour about halfway to [View Full Entry]

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We headed out after breakfast relatively early on Highway 7 which heads due south to Slovakia. A word of advice for anyone wanting to take this route is wait a couple of years and it should be great, as it was there were roadworks all the way for about 100km. Every bridge was one lane with traffic lights controlling the flow so it took about 2 hours to reach the border. Once we reached Slovakia the roadworks finished and we cruised along smoothly. We bought a motorway sticker as we didn’t plan on spending much time in Slovakia as we felt [View Full Entry]

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Next morning we headed east towards Poland en route to Oświęcium - home of Auschwitz. We were not sure where we were going to stop, just going to see how far we got and find a campsite when we were ready. Jac had just about sorted out the map so we didn’t have too much trouble getting out of the city - only one wrong turn - and we drove most of the day. The Czech roads were not too bad, we were not on the motorway so it was always single carriageway, but there were lots of trucks. When we [View Full Entry]

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We left Freistadt at about 10.30am and it was still raining. We got to the border a short time later not knowing what to expect and found that the old border control buildings were still there but we just had to follow the signs and sort of drive around it, I don’t even think anyone was watching. We stopped at the garage down the road and bought our motorway sticker thanks to the Lonely Planet guide (which told us what it’s called) and VISA (as we had no Czech money yet), and carried on north. About 40km later we came to [View Full Entry]

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In the morning we had a wander around the area before heading off again. We were travelling on minor roads which provide great scenery but can be very steep in places as you pass over the hills and through the valleys. Ferd worked at Hotel Hochschober at the ski resort area of Turracher Höhe on the border of Carinthia and Styria at 1800m. The last part of the road before we arrived had to be driven in first gear but Dobby, our faithful servant, kept his cool. We pulled up in front of this really flash hotel and, thanks to a [View Full Entry]

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Drove back to St Poltein to find our friendly hardware store to buy an adaptor for our power cord, and by the time we found our way out again we had decided to only drive to the outskirts of Vienna today as we would not have enough time to see anything. So we hunted around for a camping ground or info centre without any success until about 7pm when we came across a bit of a forest which we could drive into quite easily so we tucked ourselves away from the road and parked. We still had plenty of light [View Full Entry]

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After a good nights sleep (the bed didn’t seem too hard - no worse than the Chinese beds!) we decided we were going to head west to a place called Bad Aussee (loosely translated bad means bath or bathe and see is lake) in an area we later discovered to be called Salzkammergut (love that name!). We were staying off the autobahns as we did not have a sticker on our window but most of the roads were pretty good. Once again there were many motorcyclists on big bikes taking advantage of the good weather on the weekend - and a [View Full Entry]

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