It was 4:30am when I decided that I had enough of sleeping and wanted to get moving. Especially after the poor night I had. We made ourselves quietly downstairs to the cars in order to not wake anyone else up.
Ajay had picked the location for the night based on it’s proximity to a castle which he wanted to visit. The Neuschwanstein Castle is famous due to it’s classic Disney-esque design, in fact many famous fictional castles are based on it including the recent movie Beauty and the Beast.
It is quite a tourist attraction but as we went there at 5am, it was deserted. After looking around for suitable car pparking nearby, we decided to see if we could just drive up to the castle itself. We were in luck, as it was very early the carpark in front of the castle itself had ample parking.
As the sun rose from behind the mountains, it bathed the castle in a golden light, this was the perfect time for taking photos as this sunrise time is known as the golden hour. The location of the castle itself was stunning, the castle itself was quite imposing. We were disappointed when we found the front of the castle covered in scaffolding. after taking a few pictures we decided we would head onto the motorways to Italy via Austria before any commuter traffic began.
Ajay was at the front of the column and managed to make an interesting detour onto some forest fire roads as soon as we entered Austria, we don’t know why his sat nav decided to take us off road but our first impression of Austria was that we had entered a backward country with unpaved roads. Luckily this wasn’t the case as the sat nav brought us back to civilisation.
I complained that the twisty roads aren’t very good to drive on in the Q3, Ajay replied back on the walkie talkie that his brakes were on fire and Ravi added that he had probably popped his tyres. My reply back over the radio was a single word “Good!”, as I wasn’t too happy with being in an Q3 as opposed to an MX-5.
It seemed as though the Austrians didn’t appreciate Ajay’s and Ravi’s headlights blinding them with their unaligned beams. This is becacuse when travelling to Europe where they drive on the right, the headlights are pointing in a different direction than lights in the UK.
We stopped off at a supermarket which also had a cafe to have breakfast and Ajay and Ravi decided to use the beam converters they had purchased on the car. We purchased this one to use on the cars, they work on every car:
Ravi found another dog outside the shop and decided that he would try to feed it. We didn’t really have time for his animal shenanigans so we decided to leave before he ended up kidnapping it.
The remainder of the journey to our hotel in Merano was relatively uneventful. Once we arrived at the hotel we were staying at called Hotel Laimerhof which was surrounded by vineyards we decided to look for food. We found a pizza place quite close to the hotel and didn’t venture far.
Once back in the hotel for the night, a lightning storm arrived, it was brief but exciting as the view from the hotel was great. I was awaiting news from my brother to see if I was to be an uncle again and was told that I had to wait a bit longer.
I had a much better night sleep than the previous hotel, we would need a good night considering that we were going to tackle the 2nd highest mountain pass in Europe the next day, the Stelvio Pass.
Tabish
Long Way There 