Traunkirchen

I am woken at 5.18 by the sounds of moaning and grunting from the room above us. Three minutes later it’s off.

Hotel porno...

We eventually rise at around 8 and are leaving the hotel by 8.30 as we need to be at Liverpool Street Station by 9.20 to get the bus we’ve booked in advance to take us out to Stanstead. We make it by 9.05 but no-one seems to know anything about the where the bus leaves from....

We're using Terravision, a new Italian company which only seems to sell tickets over the net and undercuts every other provider. But they don’t have an office at the station. Information people say they’ve often been asked about the departure location but can’t help us...

It’s an anxious twenty minutes or so spent combing the area surrounding the station for any sign of where we ought to be. Then, suddenly we see the bus pull up a block away and round a corner. We rush along and make it to the bus feeling a bit foolish for having doubted the situation and thinking perhaps we’d been ripped off....

The journey to Stanstead is quick and comfortable and I’d recommend Terravision to anyone heading to that airport from London for a flight. At present the departure point is from behind the large crane you see when you exit the station at the door beside station for London buses...

At Stanstead we have a hearty breakfast and then head for check in. I remark to Anne “Nobody’ll be going to Linz on a Sunday...”

However, the desk is stowed out with a queue in front of us of around 100 Austrian school children who’ve been over in England at a language school. This is rather tiresome to say the least though the jukebox helps me through...

After taking around 40 minutes to check in, we go immediately to the gate and are first in the queue. In ones and twos and finally a flood, the Austrian kids join us there. They try and push in front of us but I’m having none of it....

After the old people, cripples and parents with small children (have I mentioned before you should always travel with a small child when flying), we are first out onto the tarmac – though at least a couple of teenagers run past us (and the old people, cripples and parents with small children) and get on the plane first...

We are close to the front for the 95 minute flight and it passes quickly with nothing to report other than the annoyance of kids in the aisle looking at a laptop one of them has brought on board – apparently the only thing on the hard drive are pictures of cars?? Nonetheless these prove popular...

At Linz, it’s scorching and we collect our bags very quickly indeed and are soon in the Hertz building just opposite the main concourse. Five minutes later we are in a bright yellow VW Polo heading for the lakes and mountains...

We realise we may well have wasted the money we spent on atlas back in June as the Hertz people have supplied us with several maps of the area which have much more detail than the atlas...

It’s a good uneventful drive and we listen to the first of the CDs I bought in London – Alice Martineau. Excellent pop fayre from this singer who sounds like a cross between Dido and Bjork.

I have a sneaking suspicion I’d read somewhere that she had died not long after the CD was released.

When we came home I checked up on this and, sadly, found I was correct.

Considering her situation - she had suffered from cystic fibrosis from birth - the album is quite an achievement. She had to use an oxygen mask virtually all the time and had to be hooked up to machines daily to clear her lungs. She was continually short of breath. She didn’t like to be thought of as brave – but she certainly was. You can read more about Alice Martineau here: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Martineau

At just after 5pm, a few tracks into our second listen to the CD, we arrived at the house. It was up a hill in a small village overlooking the Traunsee. We were given the top floor of the house and, from the balcony, had a quite breathtaking view of the meadow, the lake and the Traunstein mountain all stretching out before us...

We unpacked and I took my first photos of the holiday. Then we drove down to the nearby village of Traunkirchen and took a stroll around the lakeside. By seven we were sitting at an outdoor café having our first Austrian beer of the trip...

Then we took a look at the menus of the two restaurants in the town and decided on the “stand alone” place rather than the one connected to the main Hotel in the town...

I had another beer (drink driving already – but it was only five minutes up a twisty windy road in the dark to the house...idiot!) while Anne had a large glass of the local white wine.

I ordered a starter which consisted of breaded mushrooms with potatoes and tartar sauce – delicious, while Anne went for a salad followed by a Wiener Schnitzel (which is a pork cut, flattened and cooked in breadcrumbs) and I thought I’d ordered some kind of onion roast from the description on the menu.

However, it turned out to be a lamb stew with onions.

I ate it anyway.

It was tasty.

I figured the lamb was already dead whether I ate it or not and, if I didn’t, it would end up in the bin and its life would have been taken in vain.

This is a re-run of why I turned veggie in the first place back in 1989.

I’d been considering my stance for a while and finally, in an Indian restaurant, found I just couldn’t finish my meal. I vowed not to have another animal die in vain and end up in the bin on my account – of course, in hindsight, I suppose I could’ve just taken a vow never to not clear my plate...

Driving back up to the house, we had Berlioz blaring in the car. From the balcony, the night view was spectacular with all the little lights twinkling over the lake at the foot of the mountain. While Anne researched things to do and places to go I flicked through the TV channels and found a jazz station...

Then it was off to bed having made a shopping list of provisions to buy in the morning....

A good start to the holiday proper....