Left Udine on Sunday to travel up into Germany (via Austria). We are going to a town in Germany called Passau. No reason for picking it other than its in Bavaria and it is the confluence of 3 rivers, one of which is the Danube. What should have been a fairly leisurely 3 - 4 hour drive turned into a drive of epic proportions.
Left Udine Ok. Found the Autostrada OK. The fog even started to lift as we neared the mountains, pretty soon we were bathed in sunshine.
The Dolomites look very impressive, even from a distance. Rocky tors jutting up from the valley floor. Not much snow on them though, probably a bit early for that yet. But that just makes them seem more bleak and formidable.
The highway followed the valley floor all the way through, so we didn't climb very much. Crossing into Austria was a fairly mundine affair - one end of the tunnel was Italy, the other end was Austria.
Soon we were passing past Salzburg. This is the point at which the drive turned to ****. Still 250km to go and it looked like all of it was going to be on a small regional road. And it was. Made for slow going. A village to be negotiated every 20km, multitude of trucks on the road. Went from averaging over 120kmh to less than 70. This was going to take ages.
And then, to make matters worse, just when we were into the last 50km, the road was closed and we had to backtrack to make a detour. Added about an hour to the trip. Then we hit a long line of traffic inching along. "Great" we thought, "Just what we needed, a traffic accident." But it wasn't. As we neared the head of the line we could see that it was a security checkpoint. Police were channeling traffic into one lane and selecting cars to either pull off to the side or go through. We must have looked harmless because we were waived straight through.
After almost 6 hours we finally made it into Passau. Pretty place. All the usual suspects are here - cobbled streets, colonnaded buildings, Xmas markets, church spires, etc. Took a walk along the Danube. Lots of those river cruise boats are moored along its banks - Passau must be a stopping point. Found our way to where the markets were located. Lots of people there. As usual, the Germans do Xmas in a big way. Every second stall seems to be devoted to selling mulled wine, various types of sausage, sauerkraut and potatoes. We sampled some of them, including a local hot dog made up of a 1/2 meter sausage in a bun - superb.
Passau has been an interesting stop - we even decided to stay an extra day. The weather has been really cold, but no rain or snow yet. It's a very picturesque place, easy to see why river cruises pull in here for a stopover.