INNSBRUCK 10-12 April

We headed out of Zurich early morning; destination Innsbruck, Austria.  It was exciting to be on the road exploring again and after about 1.5 hours we were in the Principality of Leichtenstein.  We stopped here for lunch and there wasn’t much else to see, except glance up at the castle, so we headed off again.  We realised by this stage that we had been in 3 countries in a morning – Switzerland, Leichtenstein and Austria.  The scenery was incredible and we followed a river for quite a while which we could tell was water coming down from the snow capped mountains.  We just had to try some of the freezing alp river, so we found somewhere to stop and we all felt the refreshing water.  It was so clear and clean that we filled up our water bottle for the rest of the trip.  One thing about Austria, there are hundreds of tunnels under the mountains.  The longest we went through was 14kms long – the Arlberg Tunnel, with a toll at the other end of 8.50 Euro. 

Finally we arrived in Innsbruck about 2 hours after Leichtenstein and we found our hotel, dropped our bags and car off and went exploring this beautiful and historic city.  What makes it so stunning is that it is in a valley surrounded by majestic  snow capped mountain ranges.  The Winter Olympics were held here twice.  We wandered down through the city looking at all the pastel and ornately painted buildings and trams everywhere and in a large open plaza, we found an Italian restaurant to have dinner.  The whole bill totalled around $50 which was very cheap for what we had.  This city is very reasonable in prices compared to some others we have been to so far.  After dinner we went for a walk along the river admiring the sun setting over the mountain ranges and then got an icecream and headed back to our hotel.

Sophie in the Innsbruck Mall

After breakfast in the hotel the next morning, we headed out for a look around in the car.  We visited the Bergisal which is the Olympic ski jump.  We had a hot chocolate in the restaurant overlooking Innsbruck.  We again headed off in search for greater heights and ended up on the other side of Innsbruck and up in the cable car to Hafelekar which is at 2256m on a snow-capped mountain.  The kids were so excited to be in the snow.  The views were absolutely incredible with a glider plane flying around in front of us as we looked down on the city of Innsbruck.  We played in the snow for a while, feeling quite afraid of the heights and shear drops off each side and finally we headed down one stop to Seegrube at 1905m where we had lunch on the terrace still overlooking the incredible views.  The kids had a snow ball fight with Corky and I think all of us ended up with snow down our clothes at some stage.  At 5pm we headed back down to the city and put our feet up for a while and then out for dinner. 

At the top of the mountain

Beautiful view back down to Innsbruck

At the very top ... and very scared!

Incredibly high!

Ahhhhh ... !

The old city of Innsbruck where we ate dinner was so beautiful with its old, old buildings and cobblestones and backdrop of the snowy mountains and I would even go so far to say it is romantic but unfortunately I couldn’t really say that because our eyes were constantly glued to 4 roaming children rather than each other.  Once again, gelatos were enjoyed after dinner as we wandered back to our hotel.

Off to a new city and our next adventure tomorrow morning .... xx