Arriving in Austria

The trip to Austria was supposed to take 6 1/2 hours.  The drive through Germany isn't very exciting and its the longest part of the trip.  There are a lot of fields and windmills.  Windmills used to be fascinating, and every time I saw some I'd point out the window and yell like a little kid, "look at the windmills!!".  But now I've seen enough that windmills are windmills and they get old after a while.  Same with cows and horses.

When we take long car drives we like to get Burger King for lunch.  Its one of the increasing number of fast food chains in Germany, but we only get it on road trips.  Its okay... but Bob loves it.  So around lunch time we decided to find a Burger King.  The GPS said there was one only 2km off the highway....

25 minutes later we were in a strange town full of one-way streets.  Somehow we managed to drive off the streets all together and found ourselves in the middle of a pedestrian plaza surrounded by pedestrians (who wouldn't get out of the way for the car that wasn't supposed to be there) and streets marked with "do not enter" signs.  The GPS was going crazy. "Turn left on... Turn right... contin... left... turn... make a u-turn??"  To make matters worse we somehow managed to attract a cop car... AND we never found the Burger King.

We did see a really pretty church though.

And we finally found our way back to the highway... only to see a sign for a rest stop with a Burger King just a few minutes later... 

The nice part about driving to Austria was that the boring part through Germany (and the exciting detour) took just as long as it said it would.  It was only once we got to Munich (which is pretty close to the border) that we encountered the ridiculous amount of traffic as all the other cars from Germany (and Poland and Hungary and the Czech Republic and even the Netherlands) piled onto the same highway to get to the ski resorts.

Fortunately, Munich is close enough to the Alps that we started seeing snow-capped peaks.  

Even though the last hour and a half of the drive took us three and a half hours, it was beautiful and we were excited so we didn't mind much.

I'm pretty sure there weren't even real traffic jams.  There were just a bunch of signs that  said traffic jam (stau in German) and every time the cars passed under one, everyone slowed to a crawl until they forgot the sign and sped up again... 

Notice we are before the sign.  No traffic.  Notice the traffic backed up immediately AFTER the sign.

We also got to drive through some sweet tunnels.

This is us IN the tunnel... 

And finally, we knew we were almost there when we passed under this ridiculous gondola.

Notice there are no posts.  The crazy thing starts ground level and goes on just cables up half the mountain.
We did NOT ride in that one.

**NOTE:  Due to the lack of internet in our apartment, these posts are dated according to when they happened... even though I'm posting them all right now, from Dresden.  Sorry!