So here we are in Salzburg, Austria! The birth place of Mozart, the setting for the Sound Of Music and the home to KTM, the birth place of Betsy!

Actually we are a little north of there in a place called Mattighofen but it sounded like a good intro so I went for it…

After a crazy weekend with Paul at the MotoGP we spent the next 5 days trying to get over it at Dean’s cousin Chiara’s house with Dario and Bianca. As always its super hard to pull ourselves away from the homes and families that people welcome us into, but it’s all part of travelling!

With tears in our eyes we sadly left Italy, its Apertivos, good food and ridiculously beautiful scenery and headed north through a more German Italy into Austria.

It seems that the autumn switch has been flicked over night and we are now rugged up and cold trying to avoid grey clouds and rain storms – pretty miserable riding conditions.

We managed to avoid getting much rain riding into Austria, which we were very thankful for as it was beautiful going up and over the Brenner pass. Unfortunately however, after a long tiring day, when we arrived at the campsite we had marked for the night we found out that all the campsites in the area had closed as the season was over!

It then started to pour…

We knew that everything in Austria was expensive so we hadn’t even bothered trying to find any accommodation nearby, and with sunset only an hour away, no internet and rain, we were feeling pretty miserable and deflated.

Being tired wasn’t helping our decision making skills but we eventually decided to find a place to eat, get some internet (to look for alternative accomodation), get warm and dry, and then work it out.

After much deliberation, we had initially decided to go back and put our tent up in the rain (in the closed campsite) after dinner, but 2 glasses of wine, a beef goulash and schnitzel later, Dean then found a hotel down the road with a price that we could talk ourselves into.

Anyway, we didn’t fancy having to put a wet tent away and wet riding suits back on to ride to the KTM factory in the morning.

We felt even more justified when we woke up and realised it had been raining hard all night and was going to continue to do so all day.

Unfortunately due to the weather and the expense of everything, we decided there wasn’t much point spending another night in Austria if it meant we had to spend the whole day in a hotel room  – so instead we rode though to Prague, stoppinh only for our tour of the KTM factory.

The KTM factory tour may not have been the romantic image we had in mind, but it was interesting to see where Betsy came from. I’m sure Dean would have more to say here but I can’t wait any longer for him to write about it J

We are now in Prague where the rain has stopped, the sky is blue and it has that beautiful autumn feel about it. We only have a few more riding days left before we get to the UK which we plan to get to in less than two weeks so we are going to take our time and enjoy our last days in Europe and our last days of this epic trip.

While we are both excited to see family and friends there is also the sad reality that it is all coming to an end…