Our Austrian base was around one hour south of Salzburg, so we headed into the city for a day trip. It's a lovely city, nice architecture and clearly very prosperous, also thronged with tourists in midsummer. One funny thing I noticed was that several of the female Asian tourists there dressed up in traditional Austrian costume to walk around doing their sightseeing, I didn't take any pics of them unfortunately!
Also I'm sure Mozart would be proud that the ground floor of the house he was born in is now a Spar mini-supermarket.
Next day out was South to Slovenia, the 6th foreign country of the trip, a drive of just over 2 hours from Schladming to the beautiful Lake Bled with its island church in the middle of the crystal clear lake. The drive included the longest tunnel of our trip, almost 5miles/8km I think with the Austria/Slovenia border right in the middle of it under the mountain! It was 12 years since we had last been to Bled and our kids had never visited.
We took the obligatory tourist gondola over to the island, pushing that thing with 10-15 tourists on board all the way across the lake and back several times a day looks like a good work out to me!
This is as far from home as we would get on this trip, from here onwards it was the return journey.
Time to leave Austria via a quick drive by of the beautiful Hallstatt. Unfortunately being so attractive it was completely rammed full of buses carrying tourists so there was literally nowhere to park and we had to make do with a view from a spot a couple of kms outside the village itself.
After a couple of days in the big city it was back to camping again, this time in Rothenburg-ob-der-tauber, a true gem of a well-preserved German town!
A lot of East Asian tourists here, including the couple getting married in the main town square.
We shared our campfire dinner with a couple of German teenagers, only 14 years old they had cycled 50 kms from home to stay there for a few days in the summer school break. One of them had cycled that 50kms on a unicycle which I thought was especially impressive!
Next up something very different. A brief stopover in Germany's financial capital Frankfurt. This was literally just a couple of hours en route from Rothenburg to the next campsite in Luxembourg. We parked up, walked across town (Frankfurt city centre is pretty small given its skyline of tall buildings) then an old friend of mine working at Deutsche Bank HQ very kindly signed us all into her building so that we could get a good view of the city from one of the top floors.