On the Road to Slovakia! Where are we???

1/ A: "Haven't we been in this tunnel before???" G: "Don't think so?" P (the GPS): "At the first available opportunity do "U-Turn"! "

Phew!! We’ve made it to Bregenz, Austria today after a later start than expected. At least, I think we are in Austria, but we could also be in Germany, Switzerland or Lichtenstein! Let’s face it! Graeme and I are both fairly directionally challenged at the best of times. Thank goodness for Penelope the unflappable GPS system! While we are obviously on the shores of Lake Constantine, there was no small amount of confusion getting here. We could have come here directly from Switzerland, but somehow we managed to cross into Austria, Germany and then back again into Austria. We suddenly found ourselves in a big long tunnel and then – hey presto – Deutschland! Only people with our special talent for getting lost could have done this. But as I look outside my hotel window, I have just noticed the red and white flags flying outside our hotel. I guess that means that we are, in fact, in Austria.

The town is really funky and we’re staying tonight in a quirky 3 star place called Hotel Bodensee. We had to secretly smile to ourselves when a lovely young Austrian girl showed us a couple of rooms all of which had defective lighting. We were transported back to a former life when we would do the great “room-sell” only to find that something was wrong when we opened the door to show the room. The worst was always when we'd already sold the room before and we burst in on our poor unsuspecting guests Fawlty style! Always fun! Not sure that the Austrian’s quite see the funny side of things. Certainly, our girl wasn’t cracking the same jokes as we would do in the same situation. After showing us a second room that also had no lighting, our hostess was getting quite upset. We were tired, hungry and really not sure where all this was heading, so we put her out of her misery and just took the room. While dark, it was clean (as far as we could tell in the dim light), spacious and not over the top in terms of price.

2/ More snow! Poor car - it's should be starting to sprout sleds!

A quick dinner at an Italian restaurant nearby, a quick sneak into a modern art gallery on the way home, then I will confess that it was home in bed early for us. With the snow coming down it will be another long and fairly taxing drive to Vienna tomorrow.