AUSTRIA // Video

I'm SO excited to have finally finished our Austria video! It's taken a while to get through all the footage while adjusting to our live back in the states, but it's been so much fun to relive our travels, especially right now since we're really missing Holland and our European adventures. Austria feels like a dream - it was such a quick trip and fell in love with the country immediately, and we can't wait to go back and see the rest of it!

Austria // Intentional Detours

Travel days can be tough, especially when it is the last day of a fun trip and you're getting a bit stressed about heading home. There are a ton of logistics to worry about - returning the rental car, remembering to put gas in the rental car, hoping there are no surprise scratches on your rental car, getting through security at the airport, repacking your carryon to fit some of those last minute souvenirs... the list goes on. With this mumbo jumbo in mind, Anna and I have made a habit of booking afternoon flights and sneaking one last side adventure into our travel days before the chaos at the airport begins. We usually pull this off by driving to within 30 minutes of the airport with a while to spare before check-in and then finding a random country road to explore. Driving aimlessly is the best especially since this part of the trip is completely unplanned and anything you find is totally unexpected. We did this in Portugal where we found some amazing landscapes in the Algarves just off the main road back to Lisbon. In Scotland, we found the perfect loch-side spot for scarfing the last of our snacks that we weren't going to pack. In Austria, we gave this strategy another go by arriving in Innsbruck with about an hour to kill. Anna pulled up a map and saw some cool roads winding up a nearby hillside overlooking the city. We started our detour with the goal of finding a place to grab a coffee with a view. Fifteen minutes later we were at a beautiful roadside hotel, sipping kaffee looking out over the Inn valley. This place wasn't a spot that we would normally plan to visit but still it stands out now as a favorite memory from the trip. With that in mind, we're chalking this one up to another win for intentional travel day detours.

Austria // Mayrhofen

After our hike above Alpbach, the weather turned a bit nasty which was fine because we were driving for about an hour to get to Mayrhofen. This drive led us up the Ziller Valley which was huge compared to where we had been. After checking in at our Inn, we drove up to Ginzling, which is way up in a much narrower, high alpine valley. The sun broke through and for a bit it was shorts-and-T-shirt weather. Having already hiked a few hours that day, we opted for a windshield tour of our new surroundings. Again, waterfalls galore. Ended up driving to nearby Finkenberg and Tux in the Tuxer Tal valley. The latter is definitely more of a ski destination but man was it still gorgeous in the summer.

Austria // Alpbach

We left Holland on a Friday around 1400 (we think we're cool because we use military time now) and landed in Innsbruck a short hour and a half later. The plane's descent was epic – we flew over Munich, came over the alps and then up the valley following the Inn River upstream with steep mountains on each side. When we stepped off the plane, walked out on the runway, turned around and had to look up a few thousand feet to see the peaks surrounding us. A few gliders cruised above close to the valley walls. Everything was lush and green, the sky was perfectly blue and there were a few waterfalls that we could already see in the distance. This place was unreal. We were both in awe and we hadn’t even left the airport…. or runway for that matter.