Advertisement
Published: December 28th 2006
Edit Blog Post
A Driving Sort of Day
Why Not Italy…Really Why Not Since Italy is a mere 45 minutes from Innsbruck it felt like the right thing to do today. We jumped in the car after breakfast and set forth with our faithful Tom Tom guiding us, sans freeways, to Vipiteno, Italy.
A quick description of roads through the Alps: You get one of two different types of roads throughout Germany and Austria when it comes to driving through the mountains. The first type we will call the super-highway. The super highway is exactly what it sounds like, a wide, open road that is as straight as it can possibly be given the huge towering mountains standing in its way. Thanks to superior engineering and infrastructure, these roads often contain huge tunnels, amazing bridges and roads cut directly into mountain sides. Fast as they are, these roads often cut out scenery and can be a bit tense because the traffic is flying at 90-150 mph.
The second type of road is the local byway. The local byway is often a modernized goat herding path which involves twists, winds and switch backs through the mountains. These
roads head through small quaint towns and provide the driver and passenger as much scenery as possible while often providing them with a nauseating experience of constant curves. These roads, while beautiful, create a stress of their own due to constant turns and traffic of locals who know the roads well and are impatient with tourists who want to gawk and are afraid of every turn because they might plummet hundreds of feet to their fiery deaths.
We chose to take the second type of road on our way to Vipiteno, the local byway. Through the Austrian Alps you get to see small Tyrolean villages and mountains galore. We were often awestruck by the beauty we were seeing and wished we could stop every ten feet to take pictures, but of course these small roads have no place to stop - so no love for the blog, no pictures!
We arrived in Vipiteno by around 12:30 and realized that there really wasn’t much to see. So why not continue driving, right? Not knowing where to go we took the first right we came to which started a steep ascent into the lower reaches of the closest mountain. At
this point I have to stop and describe a new third type of road: The Italian Goat Herding Path Turned Paved Road
Just when you think you’ve seen steep and windy roads the Italian go and throw a new type of crazy road at you. This particular road was barely wide enough for one car, but was of course a two way road. Its switch backs occurred in the matter of 6 feet instead of the usual 18-50 feet. This creates situations where either the driver or the passenger have momentary bouts of vertigo as they swear their side of the car is not on a road but hanging from a cliff hundreds of feet from the nearest flat surface.
As we wound up this road we realized that there was really no way to turn around so we were pretty much stuck with one path, up. Up is not so bad, because you always have firm ground staring you in the face. The only scary moment in our rise into the mountains was when a car did decide to come down our way. We pulled as far over as possible, they did to, but I swear our
rear view mirrors touched as we passed. SCARY!!
After a twenty minute ascent to what appeared to be at least 1500 feet over the valley floor we cam across a hotel with a parking lot where we stopped, caught our breaths and took some pictures. From there, it was time for the really fun part, Down!!
Down is much scarier. If you shift gears while going down, the brief period while the clutch is engaged and no gear is keeping the car in some semblance of control the car immediately gains speed rapidly because of the angle of descent. I’ve never spent a good period of time in first gear, but on this trip I was forced to use first gear just to keep the car under control.
Once down, Kel and I breathed a huge sign of relief. The drive up had been well worth the scare because of the beautiful views, but we were glad to have that part of the day behind us!
Back to Austria to Visit the Area Near Innsbruck We used the super highway top return to Innsbruck, thus cutting our drive in half and reducing our
twisty and windy quotient. We decided to head towards an area near Innsbruck that had a cool scenic road and a small hiking area. Unfortunately after heading half way up the mountain we found that the road was closed for the winter despite the fact there was no snow in the area at all. Bummer for us.
We shot back down the mountain to visit Hall, a quaint town ten minutes from Innsbruck and hopefully get some lunch. I won’t bore you with details, the town was small and cute and the lunch was cheap yet satisfying.
Meeting People is Always Fun From lunch we jetted back to the Hotel where we ran into some people we had met the night before. While at the bar after dinner (Kel wanted a dirty Martini) we spoke to two gentlemen from California. One worked in banking and the other was currently living in Switzerland while his wife did some consulting work. We spent about an hour last night talking with them about our trip and about the banking industry, in an attempt to prove we weren’t just traveling bums. They were both full of suggestions on places
to visit while on our travels.
Today we ran into them on our way back into the hotel and told them we had been to Italy and Hall for the day while they had seen some cool sights in town. It’s always a ton of fun to meet people while traveling.
Earlier in the day we met a nice couple who were living in Europe for an extended period of time during their retirement. They were in the hotel to check the internet and struck up a conversation with Kel while I went to get my sunglasses in the room. While very friendly and interesting, Kel and I both really enjoyed their dog even more. They had brought him with them and told us that the customs officials hadn’t even looked at his medical history when they showed up in Switzerland. He was a well behaved dog who enjoyed our attention which we were all too eager to give since we miss Catfish, our dog.
People throughout our travels have been fascinated by our plan and experiences and have been amazingly nice and talkative when we have struck up conversations with them. If you just leave the
English speaking world, all the English speakers come out of the woodwork and are as nice as can be. It really makes the travel that much more interesting.
Hope you are all well!! New Years is creeping up, hope you are all prepared!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.262s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 22; qc: 89; dbt: 0.1493s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.4mb
Katie
non-member comment
Happy New Year
Happy almost New Year, Team Turner! I just took a minute to get caught up on your Christmas week travels. Thanks so much for the pix of the snow. Richmond has been in the 50's and 60's so it was nice to see some snowcovered trees at this holiday time of year. I'm sure you now appreciate how tough those bicycle racers (like in the Tour de France) have it when they have to navigate those tiny goat path mountain roads. Have a great once-in-a-lifetime New Year's celebration! Katie