Into Austria

I discovered that my bike seemed to have a small fuel leak from the fuel lift pump. Maybe it was recent or maybe it had been there for a long time. I then decided to add it to the list of worries to keep an eye on and then forget it. I‘ve 2 spare ones anyway.

The rest of Germany was rather uneventful. We stayed on the Autobahn and avoided the Ausfahrts for fear of repeating the Hamm experience (only this time in the rain). One tall blonde toned German lady in her 30‘s apologised for the rain, as she stepped into her big black gangster style BMW 5 series, at a service station. Would anyone even notice a traveller back home?

As expected it rained the whole way down Germany until the last day as we neared the Austrian Border. Then the clouds started to part a little and we felt the weight being lifted from our shoulders. I am sure we missed a lot of good things in our fly through but admit a little part of me felt good to be out of the constant rain (and ads for TUV approved dating sites?)

The air was freezing but at least we were dry. As we crossed the border there was a confusing layout of lanes depending if you wanted to buy the vignette for the roads or not. We ended up in the service station despite trying to avoid it so Helen went off to enquire about the price hoping it would be the same story as Germany. 95 eur? erm what do we do now?

Its quite annoying having the phone with gps and also a file full of campsites but not being able to mash the two together. The classic/techy side of me is still trying to figure out a way round it like using grep and a load of other stuff but he is being slowly beaten into submission by the romantic/non-techy side who is not in work anymore.

Anyhoo, what we do have is a downloaded copy of travel wiki called “oxygen guide“ and it reckoned wifi at mcd‘s was free in Austria. So in we pull to the first one we see and I fired up the phone to be presented with a screen full of german. Guessing, I clicked Acsepten (or something like that – maybe I just gave away my birthrite) and we were in business. We got directions for the nearest campsite and discovered google navigation will cache them so we could follow them to the site (just don‘t make a wrong turn or yer stuffed!!)

OMG – the site it took us to was an amazing old guesthouse. Total result. Not only that but the road to it was fantastic too. Had it not been for the satnav there was no way we would have found it, not least of all because half of the roads felt like someones private lane through beautiful fields of corn. We were both absolutely elated after the prolonged low we‘d been through. All for the want of a lousy couple of Kb. Definitely need a sim card, at least in Turkey/Iran.

We celebrated with a couple of pints of the local beer in a room full of people who we could not understand before going to sleep in the freezing cold. I had weird dreams that the lost planes and ships in the Bermuda Triangle turned out to be due to pockets of Carbon Monoxide. When you think about it, it kinda sounds plausible but I wonder about my subconscious sometimes..