So we’re now in our 9th city: Graz (after Newcastle, Amsterdam, Zaandam, Düsseldorf, Bregenz, Innsbruck, Bozen/Bolzano and Salzburg). That’s my excuse for being spaced, anyway. What’s yours? You should know we are in Gruts – they live in the high wood.

We both had fairly disturbed nights and the weather was even hotter than yesterday, so we bumbled around Salzburg, going to the Haus Der Natur (natural history museum – we both would have liked to learn what deposited the salt in the first place), and then up a lift to the viewpoint outside the modern art museum on the Mönchsberg.

Perhaps the sweetest moment of the trip so far was seeing a newly married couple being photographed at the Mönchsberg viewpoint. (I’ll add a photo when it arrives from Elly’s phone but the hotel wifi is crap again.

Dinner was at a different, larger branch of My Indigo.

Here is what cyclemeter thinks we did. All of this activity had to be interspersed with long pauses in the shade for rehydration.

I guess I should make this post cover tomorrow but I’m feeling all contrary – and I have time and decent hotel just now. Also but tomorrow I will have forgotten everything I did yesterday. (This is one reason for cyclemetering – the machine can remind me where I’ve been.

Not much impetus to do a full blog. I fear it would be tedious if I tried to give all the detail. And my laptop isn’t connecting to the hotel wifi. So just the bare bones of what we did each day, the inevitable cyclemetering and a few photos that I like. I can put up more photos when I’m back.

Day 7 – first full day in the Muttiland

OK, apparently I have to correct something I said yesterday. (II won’t trawl for typos just yet, though.) It’s true the building we’re in has hireable offices as well as 3 or four bedrooms. However, the building is scheduled to be demolished. I don’t see a need to do so. While it’s not a hotel in the sense of Ibis, Holiday Inn or other chains, it seems to be in perfectly good condition. (Possibly points off fro not having a lift.) So we assume the land-owners want to. build something taller. Meanwhile, it’s friendly, has an outside bar with a food-truck, as well as every popular indoors bar. So I hope execution is stayed.

Day 6: travelling to the Muttiland!

Oh dearie dearie me: I’m beginning to understand why Deutsche Bahn’s reputation is going downhill. I love all the marshalling yards outside even relatively small stations, the bookshops that sell real books, the decent coffee, the various accents along the way. But a 6 1/2 hour journey that got delayed and delayed even more as we travelled: no thanks. Were we caught behind a local chugaboom? Or were we the local chugaboom holding up everyone else? Even cyclometer caught the bug, not mapping at all where we were despite restarting the phone:

Day 4 – last full day in Zaandam

On one of our previous visits to Noord Holland, we went to Marken, a small island in the IJsselmeer. So we decided to go and see what has changed and how much we could remember. (It doesn’t help that I’m envisaging Reichenau in the Bodensee as I type this.) Cyclemeter captured our bus journeys there and back again, walking around the island, and then my evening peregrinations back in Zaandam.

Days 1-2

And while France votes, and the UK starts to get used to a change of government, we are away from it. The first part of round and round is learning how to switch off again.

Hence travel south and east, by tram, train, coach, ferry, coach, and train to Zaandam. Yay, we are on holiday, and can relax. There is a bit of weather, but it’s not a pain.