Belties abroad again

 

We had the most interesting journey from our start point in Hells Valley. There was a considerable amount of mountain mist crossing the Black Forest early on but that cleared slowly and we got closer to Lake Konstanz. The first treat of the day was sighting a Zeppelin sailing closer to us as we approached Friedrichshafen. I shouted at Steve to pull in because this was not just an inflatable Zeppelin shaped balloon showing where the local DIY store was and that we should get a few shots of it before it had completely passed. 

I have not loaded today’s photos and I only hope that of the half dozen Steve took with his phone that at least one is useful. We had been working in roughly that area a few months ago and had fun with the phone Sat Nav that pronounced the road we had a delivery for Ze Pellin Strusse, but today we noticed that after we had seen this full sized passenger Zeppelin float by, that almost everything in that area was related. The Graf Zeppelin Hotel then, Zeppelin University and The Zeppelin Museum, the Bräu Stübe Zeppelin and Graf Zeppelin Haus, and so on and so fifth. 

We do and have done an immense amount of driving around Europe and although when we are working we operate the ‘Go the way you know’ rule for the most part. Steve and I are both what we like to call Cartophiles. We both love maps. So when we are on holiday we are free to turn along roads that we have noticed on maps before but not really had time to just drift along to see what they are like. Steve had a route that he wanted to try today and there was no reason to rule it out. We took the turn for the Brenner Pass into Italy from roughly Innsbruck in Austria, then having passed the highest point we looked for a road with the direction shown as Brunica that we had seen was a mountain valley route through to Lienz. The result of that was that it was so spectacularly beautiful that we will have to stitch it in to a holiday sometime soon. There were so many pretty villages and utterly gob-smacking mountain scenes. It was way too a route for us good not to return to sometime. Not that much time to explore today but so glad we conducted an investigation into that area. From the end of that valley with nice views of some of the Dolomites we headed toward Villach and then to our holiday destination of many years; Hotel Sille, in Reifnitz near Klagenfurt in Austria.