I've got the whole moving exercise down to a fine art now. Got out of bed at 7.40 - no point in getting up earlier because the freshly baked bread rolls weren't available till 8.00 . Up, breakfast, shower, pack up and on the road at 10.00am on the dot. Not bad. Although it's quite a way, it's very simple. Motorway towards Munich, turn off towards Nuremberg, then Deggendorf and turn right for Passau and Linz. Off at St Florian, left at the roundabout and the campsite is the 7th turn on the left after the built up area. I knew this because I'd seen it on google maps. Couldn't be simpler really.
Stopped after 2 hours for 'lunch' - a roll with Parma ham, 1 sausage, a banana, and water; it's not a culinary tour. Stopped again to buy the road licence for Austria. 7 euros and a few bits of shrapnel. I was talking to a chap yesterday who offered me his if I could get it off his windscreen with a razor blade. He was on his way home. Didn't seem worth the hassle though a kind offer. Arrived at campsite at 2.50.
The best bit was crossing the Danube. I'm not sure exactly where it was but it was a very large bridge and an even larger Danube. I must say rivers like the Danube and the Rhine make the Thames look like a muddy stream. The are big and majestic rivers.
A curiosity is that having visited Dachau a couple of days ago the turn-off from the motorway to get to this campsite is also the same turn-off for Mauthausen. That wasn't planned, it's a coincidence. In the world of concentration camps, about which I'm becoming a bit of an expert, Mauthausen was the worst. It was a level 3 camp for the completely incorrigible types with no hope of being reformed whereas Dachau and Auschwitz etc were just level 1 for the straightforward cases - Jews, Jehovas witnesses, other general wrong doers. Mind it's all a bit relative. They all needed a very large barge poll.
The good thing about this site - camping Linz - is that the internet is free and it actually works with no waiting around, or messing with internet settings. The bad thing is that the weather is about to change. It's quite a challenge resurrecting O-level German, but fun; however O-level German doesn't really cut the mustard when listening to Austrian radio. Austrian German sounds like the person spent too long in Holland. I suppose it's a bit like serious English dialect - real Yorkshire or something except here it's official and on the radio. Anyway I did pick up that snow is expected at 1900 meters tomorrow afternoon. Good job Linz is just 200. However it will mean keeping an eye on the Brenner pass into Italy which has to be a touch over 200. It may mean sneaking home underground in a tunnel in due course rather than doing the decent thing an crossing a mountain. We'll see.
Best thing today: definitely the Danube and the mountains in the distance. I must find out what they are.
As it used to say on the Hanah Barbara cartoons 'That's all folks.'
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