A commute day today. Boring.
Well not too boring. I mean I
could be sitting at home, or working…
Germany is a very scenic country to drive
through. From Salzburg, the countryside slowly changed
from the mountains, to verdant green countryside.
Within not much more than 2 hours we’d
dropped off the car and were at the airport.
Very early. I prefer to be early
at airports, but this was very early.
And airports aren’t the cheapest of places
to eat either. Anyway, they had my
favourite weisswurst so I took advantage of my last chance to have this, and
also grabbed a nice huge weissbeer, even though it was about 9 in the
morning. I wasn’t the only one either.
I had been worrying all weekend about the
car. I'd had a bit of a brain fart, and though I had known and even put it in my notes
to contact the car lease company 4 business days before the due drop off date, as what was outlined repeatedly in the lease agreement, and that was all meant to happen when we were in Garmish, I’d somehow thought that it instead was when I was in
Salzburg and it didn’t click until 6PM last Friday that this was all wrong. Which of course was after business hours and too late to do anything about until 9:00AM Monday
morning. Today. Now.
So I tried calling, and couldn’t get
through.
And tried again, and still couldn’t.
And again, and again, for about 40 minutes,
and now I was getting quite concerned.
What would happen if I couldn’t drop the car off? I was meant to give 4 days’ notice. They’d said so over and over on all the
instructions supplied.
With no luck getting through, I tried
ringing the Barcelona office and got through straight away. I explained my problem, and he said no
problems, but you know you are meant to give 4 days’ notice? Yes, yes sorry :–( I thanked him all grateful, then Michelle
said, I think he thought you wanted to drop the car off in Barcelona? But I said Munich!?! Sure enough, ringing back he thought I was
dropping off in Barcelona. Problem not
solved. I tried Munich again. Tried their head office and tried the
supplied mobile number. I even tried
their Skype ID. No luck. I called the Australian broker, and they said
it shouldn’t be a drama, and they would try on my behalf, and to just assume it
would all be good and to drop the car off. So much worry over a stupid mistake.
So continuing our Sound of Music
experience, we drove out to Mondsee to visit the church used in the movie. Warning. Don’t look too closely at the altar
piece. There are a number of skeletons
from previous bishops just sitting in there.
Lovely.
What an amazing
tour. We were so lucky that our guide was
a trained opera / operetta singer; she had the loveliest voice and was full of
energy, singing the songs at every location we visited. She also had heaps of information about the
history and places in Salzburg, as well as the Sound of Music Movie. This is a very highly recommended way to see
Salzburg, as well as to do visit and get the most out of the obligatory Sound of Music sites.
Not a great deal to really to say of interest today, given it was a commute day. Well at least for
the morning. We farewelled our lovely host in
Garmisch, then spent an uneventful though beuatiful two hours or so driving to Salzburg. The highlight of the trip was stopping at a roadside stop
for breakfast, and they had weisswurst!
I had planned to head to Garmish via St
Moritz, but without any internet, and relying on my phone to look up the road
conditions pages which were all in German, I couldn’t confirm 100% that all the
roads would be open. So we had to take the boring safe route and go back out the way we came in, and up the freeways.
That meant those narrow roads from Hades
back along Lake Como.
To makes things worse, Sygic carked it that morning, and
there was no way I was able to get it going again.
So we had to resort to the old fashioned way: paper maps and road
signs. Now this can be a bit tricky when
your paper map covers the entire continental Europe, and road signs aren’t in
English and don’t always clearly depict the direction you need to go.
Getting back to Como was simple enough, if
extremely hairy. But in Como, the signs
for the A9 said Milano (southbound), and didn’t say Lugano (northbound). So
rather than risk it I decided to keep going on rather than just heading to the A9 and seeing where we ended up. This meant we went all around the outskirts of
Como. I decided in the end to just head
to the A9. Worse case was at least we’d
be on it, and if heading the wrong direction would just have to turn around when we were able to. As it turned out, this was the
correct course and we were thankfully on the motorway heading north. The views from up high over the lakes are
just spectacular, even today when the weather was overcast and hazy.
As the paper maps were proving a little
dubious, I turned to back up navigation, Google Maps. This worked well enough for the most part,
even though it chewed through $30 worth of overseas mobile data. Still that would have been what some decent
maps cost would have cost.
