According to the weather last night we should have been biking through drizzling rain all day but luckily for us they got it wrong. At midnight last night we were awoken by a booming thunderstorm and lots of rain but it had cleared itself by the morning. – phew!!!
So, it was a very big day for us with 50k’s to do. It is also the last big day which is a relief as starting to feel a little tired. We really enjoyed our hotel and had the best and biggest breakfast we have had yet but needed to get on the road by 9.00am.
We are following the Salzach River which must be one of the most dammed rivers we have ever seen. The river doesn’t seem to get any known d of a flow going before it is stopped by a lake – not sure what affect this has on the flora, fauna or animal life does. All the other rivers we have passed have been a beautiful green colour because of all the rock flower but the Salzach river is a very dirty static body of water.
The valley is very built up with towns and industry but that is always understandable. Even with all of this you cannot hide the beauty of it with the soaring mountains and green pastures.
We followed the valley all the way today until it got extremely narrow. Even the road and the train disappeared into tunnels as we made our way through a tight gorge on a road that was pretty busy. We normally do not bike on roads but in this case we had no choice. It is not very comfortable and we have our high viz reflector suspenders on.
Being a Sunday morning it was relatively quiet thankfully.
We cycled through some lovely villages and one we discovered had a gathering of the locals celebrating we are not sure what, but we pulled up beside them and had our morning cuppa and enjoyed the brass band.
It had a nice local feel about it.
We noticed the odd castle along the way. Didn’t have time to stop to find out too much about this little dwelling but it certainly caught out attention.
So we are now coming into the Sound of Music region with Salzburg only 20k away. We noted the brass band at our previous stop wasn’t playing any Sound of Music Theme or Mozart tunes?!?!
We stopped at a place called Golling for lunch after having ridden up a nasty hill and Di’s going again so we decided to have a look at the train timetable to see if she could finish the last 16k courtesy of the Austria rail system. We noted that a train came through in 8 minutes and another one would not be through for two hours.
This resulted in a huge mad dash to pack up (throw in) our lunch stuff into our panniers and hightail it down to the hauptbahnof. Made it with two minutes to spare. Fras completed the remaining distance and arrived in Hallein to tell a Di that she was fortunate to catch the train as there were some rather nasty hills she had avoided.
So, we are in Hallein for the next two nights as we want to go to the famous underground salt mines and the Eagles Nest which was where Hitler use to hold his war meetings. The weather does not look good for tomorrow so we are really hoping they are wrong yet again!!!
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