Waking up early I am greeted by another beautiful day and a very nice view from my typical Austrian Gasthaus room.
After a breakfast including one of my favourites – Handsemmel (hand made Austrian bread roll) with Leberwurst I feel 100% ready for my 330km drive to Linz. I really liked this place as the owners both came to say good-bye personally and the son wanted to sit in the TWIKE for one last time.
With the canopy off, I start to drive along the Inn valley towards Innsbruck and enjoy the sun’s warm rays even through it is still only end of March.
As usual, I try to avoid larger roads as much as possible and thanks to my prep work with Google’s MyMaps I’m able to enjoy the drive even more as I’m mostly on completely deserted single-lane B-roads.
Today, as yesterday, I’m not particularly focussed on driving as efficiently as possible. Driving at higher speeds sees me and TWIKE 560 getting to Innsbruck quickly.
From there it’s only another 70 or so km to Germany and its ‘Grosses Deutsches Eck‘ – the shortest link between the Austrian Inn valley and Salzburg.
This is a mountainous region containing world-famous ski resorts such as Schladming and generally very nice to drive across – for motorists using the motorway it is known for its stretch of speedlimit-less Autobahn. (On which I – long, long ago, drove at 285 km/h for the first – and last – time. Today, to get to that speed safely, you’d have to drive this stretch of road in the middle of the night as traffic has gotten super dense during daytime)
After a very relaxing and beautiful drive across the hills, I cross back into Austria over the Salach river and an interesting metal bridge.
I’ve been to Salzburg many times. Although it’s always worth a visit, I decide to press onwards to Linz because I want to spend more time with my relatives before the party starts tonight.
With still more than one third of my charge in the battery pack, I drive to Linz without limiting my speed. From Salzburg I drive up to a moderate plateau and some rolling hills before descending to the Donau valley and Linz itself.
I get to my relatives early afternoon. They have been following my GPS track for the better part of the day and were waiting for me outside of their apartment just in time to see me arrive and open the garage for me to charge off a normal Schuko-plug overnight.
The rest of the evening with my cousin’s birthday and 60+ people attending was grand and lasted well into the next day – For me it was like coming home as I got to spend a lot of time with my cousin when I was a kid and later as a young adult and many of his long-time friends are people I still know today. Very happy to have made the effort to come!
Got back to my uncle’s apartment at around 2 AM. The plan is to eat breakfast at around 8 AM and leave by 9 for a 625km stage across Austria to Italy… Party hard – drive hard! Good night!
