Thursday 7 September 2017

We let ourselves have a little rest in this morning as we were going to have a very big day getting to Lugano.  We decided not to have breakfast does not go well for Sabine whilst travelling such a long distance.  Hallstatt was just magical really Sabine had heard of it briefly one day while driving so jotted it down on her drycleaning docket. When we were planning this journey we had a list of places we had heard of and decided to pop them in if we could.  It was extremely out of the way, we had also been told about Bolzano by our friend Joe so we worked from there. Two places we knew nothing about were outstandingly beautiful and the journeys to get there were unbelievable. 

We caught the ferry across the lake at 9.15 and our train from Hallstatt was 9.25.  This journey was lovely arriving in Stainach-Irdning at 10.35. Our train to Zurich was 11.40 so had a little wait, the café was not open but the lass made us a coffee and we had that with a Snickers very healthy indeed.  None of the trains in Austria are booked which you know is kind of good the booked ones are exhausting really one would think it would be the other way round but no.  Lovely train also had the entire compartment to ourselves for four hours until Innsbruck then a couple joined us for 15 mins then we had it to ourselves for the next four hours.  This was a long journey but the scenery was breathtaking 8hrs of postcard scenery. The rivers are without a doubt too beautiful, I had said to Sam this blog will be short I am just going to say there are no words, he said funny you and no words very funny indeed.  We pulled into Zurich at 7.20 and our Zurich to Lugano train was 7.32.  They announce on the trains which platform you will put into and then a list of whatever trains and which platform they will go from, we had googled that but of course there are always last minute changes which there was in this case, we came in at platform 10 and the next one was platform 8, great station lifts and escalators so we had the changeover done in 7 mins.  This was another gorgeous train pretty much had this to ourselves until Lugano where it terminated.  We pulled in at 9.40 a ramp out and this was on the same level as the funicular which takes one down to the town.  We had bought something to eat on the way to the funicular got onboard and with all Sam’s good planning we hopped out of the funicular and our hotel was 25 steps away, we booked in completely exhausted.  This morning Sam said we did not lock the door we did not even close the door it was still ajar, no wonder we were done.   Sabine and Sam