Ferda and I planned this tour as far as the Dolomites. Then we started looking at tickets back to Antalya — from Venice, from Milan, from Innsbruck. Turns out Munich was a lot closer than we realized, and the tickets were the best deal with frequent non-stop flights to Antalya. I still had about three weeks left in my Schengen permission so we had time to enjoy the ride.
We started with a long downhill from Colfosco.
We descended into a busy highway corridor and took over an hour that evening to find a place to camp. This castle:
was locked up but anyway was probably too close to the highway to be a comfortable place to spend the night.
The next day we seemed to spend the whole day climbing Brenner Pass. It wasn’t steep or difficult, but it certainly took longer than we expected.
Again it took a while to find a place for our tent. We ended up cresting the pass and camping at this open place (a parking lot?) near Brennersee.
It was warm when we arrived, but check out Ferda the next morning:
July in Austria!
Traffic wasn’t a problem going up Brenner Pass on the Italian side, but yikes it was a narrow, nasty road with heavy traffic on the Austrian side. Thankfully we were going downhill. Reminded me of Wurzen Pass. There were better options after about 10km or so, but it wouldn’t be nice to go up that section.
Innsbruck is a fairly big city in a nice setting, but we didn’t stick around. It might be that the city is more known for access to the surrounding mountains. I didn’t find anything interesting in the city in my quick internet search.
Here are a couple photos of the large valley where Innsbruck sits.
We left the main valley at Telfs (where we enjoyed talking with an Alevi woman from İzmir who has lived eight years in Austria) and started up another pretty side valley.
It was easy to find a great campsite with a river to cool off in and wash up in. Weren’t we cold in the morning just the day before?!
A small (unnamed?) pass set us up for Fern Pass which was so steep that we were pushing at times, a good ending (I guess?) for our last pass in the Alps.
We coasted down to a camp next a canal at the edge of agriculture fields in Ehrwald.
The next day we used the rain as an excuse to eat lunch out, our only restaurant meal in Austria.
Dinner that night was in Germany.
Looks like fun!
Shit, Austria, now that’s a scary place! You are far more brave than I!