Road Trip Day 2 - Salzburg to Novigrad over the Alps

We were completely tired by the time we got back to our hotel in Salzburg, so we all went straight to bed. In some ways that was inevitable, 'cos we were all staying in one room. We got the longest amount of sleep in months - Tom was the first to wake around 8:30am. So good to catch up on sleep!

Then a quick brekky in the hotel and off we drove to Croatia, beginning our journey after filling up another tank of petrol pretty close to midday.

  

We decided to take the scenic route and drive along the Grossglockner High Alpine Road, which happens to be the tallest road in Europe. It took us about 1,5hrs to get to the start of it, and then having paid 25 EUR discounted price we were climbing into the Alps! The views were just staggering. After about 30 mins of driving we had snow on both sides of the road. The road is great and gets taken good care of. There was a multitude of special snow cleaning machines all along the road. There were many people on motorcycles enjoying the views. And a lot of very brave and motivated bike riders. The road is very steep and windy, but we saw only one guy who has gotten off and was pushing his bike - the rest were soldering on.

There are lookouts all along and a big one right at the top. From there we even saw an avalanche on a mountain across from us. Tom fell asleep a second before we got there, so he enjoyed it only passively. Having taken some pictures we set off again and after about another 30 mins the road stopped abruptly at a closed gate. This got us pretty worried, as we already began to imagine various scenarios of having to drive back to Salzburg and taking a different road. But it turned out to be only closed for those who wanted to go look at a glacier. Although even those people were not allowed through, because in half an hour they were expecting a helicopter to come flying to drop bombs to set off more avalanches to get the snow off the mountains. Unfortunately we had to head off and couldn't stick around for the fun, but we still saw plenty of beauty on the way down.

 

 Shortly after we got to the end of the Grossglockner Road we crossed the border into Italy. The change of scenery was interesting. After a little while it was very obviously no longer Austria - houses had plenty more flowers and people didn't seem to pay as much attention to the road - both drivers and pedestrians. As we left the Italian Alps behind us we got onto a paid Autostrada, which must be the best road I've ever driven on... EVER!  It was very empty in the beginning as we were passing Trieste and it had the same smooth paving as City Link when it just opened. At some point we noticed that in my excitement I kept overtaking everybody, so Jack looked up allowed speed and turned out that Italian top speed is 130. Oops.

In the late afternoon we sneaked into Slovenia. Sneaked - because the larger chunk of the Italian Autostrada lead to a great big Slovenian tollway, which would've set us back another 15 EUR, so instead we took a tiny little turn off at a service station right before the border crossing that took us onto the slower back roads. This had the additional advantage of us seeing more of the countryside, which is very pretty. We saw about 40 mins worth of Slovenia when the road suddenly stopped at a line of cars standing at the Slovenia/Croatia border. First it seemed that everyone was getting thoroughly checked but at some point the border guards must've gotten bored and just let everyone through.

Finally after another 20 mins we arrived at our final destination of Novigrad at just after 8pm. Everyone was very tired, so we went for quick dinner by the seafront. The kids didn't really eat much and Timmy nearly fell asleep in his chair. Then it was back to the apartment and sleep, sleep, sleep...