Bad Gosiern to Eisenerz

First 2 weeks complete and Gill has headed home for the UK leaving me to continue by myself (second entry to follow if connection is fast enough to exceed my supply of euro pieces). Sucessful start to the trip...have covered 100 + miles, not yet as many per day as I will need to, but of course this was the start of the building up of fitness. The route taken was a bit varied, down to early spring conditions and various other reasons as follows. We started on the Via Alpina, but soon diverged southwards where scrambly sections were covered in snow and bad weather. Our route followed the south side of the Totes Gebirge range to rejoin the Via Alpina near Spital am Pyhrn...but soon departed from it again for my planned detour to the Hochshwab, heading east along the southern edge of the Gesäuse national park to reach Eisenerz.

Various excitements were had. As well as extra miles spent retreating from snow covered passes, landslides were an occasional early season feature. The first time we discovered this was following the Geo Trail along the south shore of the Grundlsee...it seemed a bit unusual in Austria that there were no signposts for it, and sure enough this was becasue they had been taken down - you could get most of the way along before reaching the impassable, half collapsed bridge, so back again and round the other side instead. The second occasion we fortunately met a friendly local who advised in advance to take the forest road instead of the path, so avodied any problems. Instead came across forest work closures (big dangerous machines) and hunting (or deer breeding) restrictions(large fences) which again added some miles to the trip.

On the whole though very pleasant and we got to where we were trying to get to. The weather was not often good enough to see the high mountains, but was not too wet lower down. Pleasant walking along a mix of paths and forest tracks with an occasional glimpse of limestone cliffs above on some days.

We had pushed on without any rest days, being a bit nervous of the weather and with Gill not wanting to miss her flight and be potentially enlisted for the full trip. We therefore ended up with 2 spare days at the end. In Eisenery (the Llanberis of the Alps) the quarry was having a celebration of their 250 million th ton of iron...included free large explosion (one only), food (although a bit of a fight at the counter) and beer (as much as you managed to scrounge free tokens). The following day we decamped to Leoben (time out for me) to make doubly sure Gill could get her train and for a day at the pool - sauna. The following day Gill departed and I retruned to Eisenerz, and pouring rain.