To Austria by camper
The camper drives like a bus. I've never been a bus driver, but I'm sure that's what it feels like.
You feel a certain superiority over most road users, second only to truck drivers.
And on top of that, the feeling that even though you are on holiday, you are at home, which, together with your family and dog, travels with you - along with your favourite mug, pan, grill, bike, bedroom and toilet.
And those greetings passed by drivers of passing campers. The bigger the vehicle you drive, the higher you raise your hand and the more dignified and satisfied your facial expression should be. I learned this quickly and it makes me feel like a full-fledged member of the camper fraternity.
Our first stop was near Brno, at a small campsite just outside the lovely town of Vaverska Bityska. The main occupants were Dutch and Germans spending their golden years in their air-conditioned caravans.
We spent the evening with beer and Czech sausage.
In the morning, a bike trip for bread and a first breakfast in front of our camper. I have to admit that scrambled eggs prepared in a mobile home take on a completely new taste.
In the evening we reached Salzkammergut - an Austrian region of lakes and mountains, not far from Salzburg. Our planned campsite on Lake Attersee turned out to be full, so we drove to Wolfgangsee and spent our first night there.
It's hot and charming.
Our camper has seven sleeping places: two bunk beds in the back, two fold-out beds that serve as tables during the day - one for two people and the other for one person, and a large bed above the driver and passenger space, called an alcove in camper slang.
Mati and Julia chose the bunk beds, and Maja – the last of the children who still enjoyed sleeping with her parents – took a place in the alcove next to me, which promised a rather uncomfortable night of fighting over the blanket.
We started the day with a breakfast of hot bread from the camping store and brought from Poland: pâté, sausage and ham. It must be admitted that the refrigerator in the camper is a real, technological masterpiece: it runs on a battery, gas and camping electricity.
We spent the morning in the lake. Although the guidebook lied that the water would be twenty-six degrees, it was still a good few degrees warmer than our Baltic Sea.
Surprisingly, our campsite on the Wolgangsee turned out to be only two kilometres from the small and charming town of St. Wolfgang.
The four of us went there because Julia had to stay with Fina, who absolutely refused to walk in the thirty-degree heat.
We had lunch at the White Rug Inn, whose entrance is crowned by the inscription: "The Emperor was a guest here. Here the king is the customer." The food was excellent - golden trout, pike and wienerschnitzel, and a dessert of Salzburg sorbet in the shape of the Alps.
After lunch, Mati and I went on a bicycle trip to the pristine Schwarzensee.
It must be admitted that they have a fantastic infrastructure here for hiking and cycling trips among fields smelling of freshly cut grass and cow dung.
In the evening we fired up the grill: Wurst. Brot. Weisserburgund.
Do you need anything more in life?
We left the campsite on the lovely Wolfgangsee and our next destination was Salzburg.
On the way, in search of a musical instrument museum, we stopped in the small town of St. Gilden.
In the town centre there was a travelling Italian market with all kinds of food, so it was hard to pass by indifferently. First, aubergine with tuna, marinated and grilled onion, olives with almonds, dried tomatoes. Then spaghetti with seafood washed down with Aperol Spritz. The Italians had definitely left Austrian cuisine behind.
And the fact that Wiener Schnitzel is a better version of the Milanese schnitzel, brought to Austria two hundred years ago by Count Radetzky, in which the imperial chefs swapped the pork loin for veal, adding flour to the breading and frying it in lard instead of olive oil, won't change that.
The campsite near Salzburg turned out to be located in the city, less than five kilometers from the center. We quickly unpacked and went sightseeing: Mati - by bike, and the rest with our dog Fina - by bus. Austria is after all the most dog-friendly country in Europe, so we wanted to make sure Fina had something to tell and brag about her vacation spent in Salzburg to the other dogs in Chyliczki.
Salzburg is a small city. A bit smaller than Rzeszow. With a dense network of "trams on suspenders" and bike paths. Squeezed between three mountains and a river. A city of music with four thousand concerts a year. The city of Mozart, whose name is given to everything around him, the best of which are the marzipan Mozartkugeln.
The city is dominated by Hohensalzburg Castle, which we did on foot, despite the tempting queue to the very top. The Old Town is enclosed in one square kilometer - with the Cathedral and the Benedictine Abbey. It's all elegant and dignified, but Julka claims, and I agree with her, that it doesn't compare to our Toruń.
We got so caught up in the sightseeing that we missed the last bus to the campsite. Uber is slow here and regular taxis won't take dogs, so I put all the girls in a taxi and went on a long and exciting walk through Salzburg at night.
The next day we changed campsites to Hallstatt, eighty kilometres to the south.
Guidebooks say it's the most beautiful town in Austria and you can't miss it. The lakeside town is visited by two million tourists a year, the majority of whom are slant-eyed.
The biggest attraction is the chapel with the ossuary, which contains the skulls and bones of over a thousand residents. This is because there is no place in the town for a traditional burial, and until the 1990s, in order to prepare a place for further burials, corpses were dug up and their bones placed in the chapel.
Potato soup, schnitzel and chardonnay taste just as they should here.
We had to leave the campsite in Hallstadt by noon so as not to have to deal with the campsite manager, who in appearance and behavior resembled a nationalist militiaman.
Our next destination was Zell am See. The road was winding in serpentines. Our camper reeked terribly of burning rubber, but we managed and didn't burn the clutch.
On the way we stopped at the largest waterfalls in Europe, in Krimml. To see them, you have to climb a winding path up a steep mountain with a crowd of tourists. They are four hundred meters high, and we gave up only about halfway up that distance, after a murderous battle with gravity.
Zell am See is a charming lakeside resort surrounded by high mountains. Together with Kaprun it is a large ski resort, which is nice to see in summer, take a gondola ride to the top and walk the ski trails.
The beautiful town is beloved by the followers of Mohammed. They make up the majority of the people on the streets. There are plenty of Arab pubs here, and some street signs have an Arabic version alongside the German one.
The weather has stopped spoiling us. It is warm, but it rains every day. Fortunately, the sun shines from the morning and only in the afternoon or in the evening do we hide in the camper and play Rubik's Cube or Uno, drinking Radler or Riesling.
We spent the next two days at the campsite in Hall in Tirol. Or rather, at the campsite, because the campsite is full and we, along with a dozen or so other campers from various Western European countries, are stationed in the parking lot right behind the campsite's main gate. We decided to stay here, however, because it is a good base for seeing the capital of Tyrol, and they have an Olympic swimming pool with a nine-meter ski jump.
Hall is a medieval town with almost a thousand years of history, completely out of place in the Tyrolean climate, as if transported from Italy.
Our last Tyrolean day was spent in Innsbruck. A beautiful city with a charming old town, the atmosphere of which is created by the painted bay windows of the tenement houses.
We went into the cathedral, watched a game of outdoor chess in the park, ate Wienerschnitzl, beef goulash with fried egg and sausage (Dachl-gulasch), spinach dumplings (Schlutzkrapfen), vegetable broth (Gemüseröstl), and for dessert plum dumplings with vanilla sauce (Germknödel) and a brechtan pancake (Kaiserschmarrn), drank a few Aperol spritzers and returned to our campsite.
