Swarskovski Crystal Palace - day 15

Paul gave me a sachet of something to drink before bedtime, and I had an ok sleep the night before, but last night it totally knocked me out for 9 hours. Then I woke up feeling vaguely well again – yeehaa. So we had showers in the most amazing shower block. Each shower had a shower room, and an adjoining room with a basin so it was easy to keep everything dry. The showers were wonderfully hot with good pressure, and the whole shower block was heated. The motorcamp was a bit out of the city, and was surrounded by lovely countryside with tracks for walking and mountain biking. Lots of people were there with their dogs (and the campground even had a doggie shower). It would have been easy to stay there for longer, but we had plans.

So off we drove to the Swarovski Crystal World. It took a bit to get there – thanks googlemaps! The workers might have been surprised to see us what for 90 secs at the red light, go through the one lane, do a youie at the other end and come back through again. But once we got there it was simply amazing. We didn’t quite know what to expect though had a map, and knew it had outdoor areas. We weren’t expecting the hour long inside tour through many different rooms and different experiences. I have posted pics of most of them, and they will hopefully remind me of how amazing it was. We were there for nearly 4 hours, and by that time the weather had really started to close in.

Then we started on the drive to Salzberg, and the rain got pretty hard so it wasn’t a quick drive. We had fun rocking along to old music, and did our best James Corban kareoke impressions. We also drove in Germany for part of the trip which we hadn’t expected. We had sussed out a campsite, and it had a Spar 1km away. I was getting excited thinking that was Austrian for Spa – always love a hot swim. When we got closer we started looking for a supermarket (loving the Jody cooking!), and finally ended up with one, guess what it was called? Spar! But it was a good supermarket, blueberries for 1 euro, a large watermelon, and some beef and chicken for Jody to cook.

The campsite is quite nice, and we got lots of information about what to do in Salzberg. But it is raining, so we are having a quiet night in, enjoying reviewing our pictures. Jody has liked having our SIM cards – so much that she has used 80% of the data on the first one, so we have changed her to a new one. Lucky I was prepared! She cooked a lovely meal once again, and I even felt well enough to finish off my first bottle of limoncello.

Tomorrow we were going to go to Lake Bled, but the weather forecast is bad there, so the plan has changed to go to Graz instead. We might end up in Budapest earlier than expected solely due to the weather forecast. It would have been nice to have a look around Salzberg in the morning – it is a short bike ride there, but if it rains like it is forecasted too we will just be getting up and leaving.Read more