Currently I’m in Liechtenstein, and got to my campsite a couple of hours ago. I was going to make a dash over to Italy today via Switzerland but I found out last night I would have to pay 49eu toll tax for the bike, so I’ve decided to jump over the alps via Austria instead.
There is bad weather coming in to the alps later tomorrow, and on Thursday and Friday snow is forecast on the highest parts of the alps so tomorrow is my only opportunity to cross over unless I wait until next week – so tomorrow I’m going to pop into Austria and cross the Alps into Italy. It should be good, and I’m looking forward to all those bendy roads.
It’s been a long ride today, about 280 miles. I had a lot of rain earlier on in the day, but I managed to stop at Sigmaringen to look at the 12th century castle, which was another wonderful castle straight out of a story-book or movie with knights in armour galloping off to save damsels in distress… I’ve always seen pictures of these castles, and they look impressive, but when you see then in real life, it’s hard to believe that they are real.
If anyone is tempted to come south to Lake Konstanz and ride east – forget it. I thought I’d take this route along the lake to see the views but you see little of the lake from the road. Also, the road is terribly congested. I rode about 20 miles in nose-to-nose traffic, mostly crawling – which is horrendous on a fully loaded bike. AVOID the 31 along Lake Konstanz. It’s chaos.
I was planning to wild camp tonight but I looked at two possible places in forestry but the locations were quite high in altitude – and it’s quite cold even by the late afternoon – so I wimped-out and rode into Dornbirn and a proper campsite. It’s 25eu but the showers and Wi-Fi are free and they’ve got a great lounge area which is nice and warm. Best of all, once I’d got settled-in and had something to eat, an Austrian guy from a nearby campervan came over and gave me some chocolate biscuits. He had a triumph and we chatted bikes for a while. The biscuits went down well with a big mug of tea.
Tomorrow it’s an early start and then hopefully by tea-time I’ll be in Italy. Hopefully…
