Innsbruck

Bye Bye Italy.

Oh my, how much do we love traveling and not having to fly or use an EV?

A bus and a couple of trains and we are in another country and a new exciting and very different city. Innsbruck Austria. Different, but similar.
Some similarities with differences: Surrounded by mountains with some peaks to 2,600 meters. Most advertising and business signage is now in Gothic script. Population of 230k, yet often the streets have so few people. Autumnal colours. There are strudel shops everywhere. We found a Schnitzel restaurant, but that was only exciting to half our travel group of two. As you would expect, there are churches. Some like Dom St Jakob show how rich the Hapsburg’s et.al were. Conquering and colonising and religion were pretty good for business.
Still more of “same but different”: It’s a bike city. This city is somehow more formal, so are the bike riders. The cycle infrastructure is more structured and the riders follow “normal” road rules, but they are still offered more courtesy by motorists and given more priority via the infrastructure (you might need to be a bike rider to understand that point) than we are used to at home in Aus.

We love trains so much we took a side trip today. We found ourselves in the ski town of Seefeld in Tirol. Innsbruck’s elevation is 550 meters, Seefeld is 1,200 meters. That’s 650m gain in 20k, but most remarkable is the section with many tunnels along the perpendicular rock face of the Martinswand. It is an exciting train ride over such an impressively engineered route. It’s a contradiction to feel so precarious yet safe and comfortable (and clean, and on time - we are in Austria)

It’s a bit sad that when we leave Innsbruck tomorrow, we will also be saying goodbye to The Alps. We will miss those big mountains.Читать далее