Farewell to Austria

On Tuesday 22 June we said farewell to Austria, but not before checking out a little more of the countryside at a town near Hopfgarten called Soll. We spent the morning wandering the village streets before having lunch with Sofie, Daan and Paul (who won't leave Austria to return to Holland until Thursday). Fortunately our Dutch friends will take one of our large suitcases with them on their 900km journey by car to save us lugging everything around Italy. We'll meet up with them again at their house about 40km out of Amsterdam in just over a week.
After leaving Soll we drove another 100km to Innsbruck which is a beautiful former Winter Olympic town among the snow-capped mountains. If we were to live anywhere in Austria it would definitely be here as the town was fantastic. Sandra loved the shopping (OK, I admit it was pretty good), and the scenery was just superb.
We were a bit worried about the length of the wait between us dropping off the hire car (which we originally picked up in Switzerland) and our next train trip at 11pm. Despite the 8 hour

wait for the train, the kids did a fantastic job with us checking out the town's shops until they closed at about 7pm. Wondering how we could kill another 4 hours we walked along the rapidly flowing river banks then Sandra and I thought it would be fantastic to have a progressive dinner where we just walk along and buy a snack a different shops over a couple of hours on the walk back to the train station.
It was a great way to see the city. Our train was an overnight sleeper train to Venice in Italy and it fortunately arrived on time (even though we weren't 100% sure it was our train due to some average signage at the station and the train splitting destinations somewhere in Italy as we slept, but the staff onboard were great and really helpful).
I'm so very glad that we spent almost a week in Austria as it's a wonderful country. The food is marvellous, the prices cheap (Switzerland is a major rip-off) and the landscape awesome. I'd love to come back when it's winter and the land is covered in snow.