I ended up sleeping pretty well last night with the aid of the Nyquil, but it always makes me feel a bit groggy in the morning, which is why I rarely take anything like that. However, in this case, it was better to get a good nights sleep with the aid of the Nyquil, or, alternatively, cough all night and feel even worse in the morning without enough sleep. I got up about 7:00 AM, and made a cup of coffee.
I was able to get rid of lot of the congestion in my sinuses as I drank my coffee, the heated beverage helped to loosen things up. So much so that I made a second cup of coffee, just to use up all of the coffee pods, including the one we had to purchase. That still irks me.
By the time Stephanie got up about 8:30 AM, I was actually feeling pretty good, I had eaten a blueberry muffin with my coffee and was working on the blog post for yesterday, not wanting to get too far behind.
Our plan was to check out by 10:00 AM, and if we felt like it, drive over to the Bergisel Ski Jump, which was built for the 1964 Olympics. We had a little difficulty getting there, we did not realize that the parking lot for the ski jump was as far away from the facility as it was, and Google Maps took us to the facility, so we had to backtrack to get to the actual parking lot. We had actually passed through the parking lot earlier, but had not known this was where we were supposed to stop and park for the Ski Jump visit. It was not close by and so it did not look like this was the parking lot we needed to use.
Bergisel Ski Jump – Jumper Almost Landing
We paid our Euro 10:00 each entry fee and went into the Bergisel Ski Jump Stadium. We were surprised that there were actually ski jumpers practicing on the jump, which has some type of green turf on the sloped landing area, and then a steep natural grass covered slope at the back to decelerate the jumpers. The green “turf” was sort of a long stranded material in layers, sort of like mop strings, all flowing downward in sections across the width of the jump, a little hard to describe.
We saw the ski jumpers heading to the same lift that the tourists use to go to the top, they were riding back to the top of their jump area access. The two men jumpers we initially saw were tiny, once they removed their special foam type suits. They were not that tall, and skinny as a rail. They certainly always look bigger on TV.
We rode up to the top of the lift, and then took an elevator to the observation deck, and had great views of Innsbruck and the mountains in the background. We could see the station at the top of mountain area we had gone up to yesterday, and today, there was not a cloud in the sky.
Ski Jumper Getting Ready To Go
We went down one deck and headed outside to where we could see the jumpers actually start from. It was amazing to see them jump, you could see them leave the end of the ski ramp, but then you could not see them until they had already landed and were near the bottom of the hill. It only took about 20 seconds from the time they left at the top until they were near the end of the bottom, heading up the grass deceleration slope.
They had to stop jumping for a bit so that sprinklers could wet down the entire landing area turf, and also the grass slope. I guess the water helps to eliminate as much friction as possible and more closely simulate landing on snow. They also used a different track on the jump slope, it was covered with a dimpled polyurethane surface that had a constant flow of water going down it, also to reduce friction. The normal tracks on the ski jump slope used in the winter were just astride of the water coated summer ones.
Ski Jumper Leaving Ramp
We could see that here was a platform at the end of the take off point, so we headed back down the elevator and walked to that access area. Stephanie went up with some other people already there, and when they left, I started to go up. Apparently, unknown to us, this was a restricted area, and was not supposed to be accessible behind the gate. A lady came out and asked us to leave, and we apologized, not knowing that the gate had said “restricted access”. We had watched several groups of people take pictures there before us while we were at the top of the viewing area, and the gate had been opened by others before we went up, who knew.
No Clouds In The Mountains of Innsbruck Today
We headed back down the lift to the bottom and watched a couple of more jumpers before we left and headed back to the car. We paid the parking fee at the automated machine before we left and took our ticket back to the car to use to exit the parking area. I never put the ticket into the machine to get out, the gate just lifted as we approached. Maybe parking was actually free, but I saw others pay at the automated machine before me, and we had to take a ticket to get past the automated arm to initially enter into the parking lot.
We put the location of our next hotel into Google Maps and hit the “start directions” button. The automated route wanted to take us on the faster route, but that route also entered Italy for a small section before heading back onto Austria. We knew Italy had strict Covid entry requirements, and were not sure how that would work out, so we forced Google Maps it to take us the other way by adding in an intermediate city we knew was on the route. Overall, this route was just slightly slower.
We only made one slight error at a traffic circle heading out of Innsbruck, we miscounted the exit road by one and exited just before we needed to. Google Maps did not flinch, it just routed us along in the same direction but we were now paralleling the interstate, and knew we really needed to be on it. We did a slight back track and took the one additional exit at the traffic circle and were on our way. It was about 225 Km to get to our next city, but the directions indicated it was going to take about 3.5 hours. Plus, the traffic was extremely heavy, there was some construction going on and it forced the traffic to almost come to a stop several times. In Austria, when the traffic backs up like that, the law must require that the two lanes of traffic go to the extreme right and left edges of their paved area and leave a thru way access for emergency vehicles down the middle, much better than in the US where we make the emergency vehicles speed down the shoulder to reach any accidents.
This happened several times, and people separated to clear the middle each time until the traffic started to flow, and then everyone went back to their normal lane orientation.
We exited off of the interstate and were on secondary roads for about two-thirds of the distance, passing through a lot of small towns. We stopped in one small town at a Billa Grocery and went inside to see of they had a deli that made sandwiches for our lunch. We were sort of surprised they did, and we got two freshly made ham and cheese sandwiches and a cold coke light. We also picked up some bottled water and a couple of bottles of wine. We are heading to a really small town, more like a village, for tonight. We are staying there because it is close to the start of the Grossglockner High Alpine Highway that we will drive tomorrow. The town we are heading to tonight is Großkirchheim.
After eating lunch in the parking lot, we went back inside the Billa Grocery to see of they had a restroom. They did not, but the giant Spar Grocery a block away did, so we walked there and used the facilities. There are no fast food places in Austria, and no readily accessible bathrooms, nor many convenience store gas stations like in the US. This was sort of a small shopping center by the Spar and there was an authentic Austrian folk outfit store that we went into to look around. They had all kinds of authentic clothing for both men and women, typical outfits to wear to festivals like Oktoberfest. They had some really nice things, but they were also pretty expensive, but it was fun to look at the clothing and take a break from the driving.
We still had about an hour and a half of driving before we arrived at Großkirchheim. We went through the town of Lienz, which was supposed to be a nice town to visit from some of the research I had done for this trip. However, when we arrived in Lienz, it was just one large traffic jam, and it took us about 15 minutes to get through all of the traffic. Towards the end of the congestion, we finally saw the reason for the backup, they were apparently doing a major makeover of the main train and bus stations, and there were portions of the roadway that were just allowing one lane through at a time, causing all of the traffic problems. We never did see any part of the town that looked interesting, but it may have just been that the road we were on was not going through the historical part of town.
It was not much farther until we arrived at Großkirchheim, which was more of a small village than a town. We had entered the address of our hotel into Google Maps, the Sagritzerwirt, which was located on Sagritz Street, building 31. We put the address into both Google Maps on Stephanie’s phone and into the car’s GPS. They were both in agreement until we got to the small town itself. We went with the car GPS routing, and we went on some really small roads. I had not realized that the hotel was off the main road when I made the reservation, but it was. Also, all of the small roads routing around the various buildings were called Sagritz, which did not help the cause. We abandoned the GPS and rerouted using Google Maps, which put us on this small path going through a pasture. It was not paved, but it did have two sections of bricks laid into the dirt, one for each tire. We felt really silly driving on this “roadway”, but eventually, we got back to an asphalt street, you got it, called Sagritz.
We finally saw some building numbers, and knew we were heading in the correct direction, they were getting closer to 31, our address. Then we saw a sign for the hotel, pointing us in our same direction. We had to make an extremely sharp, uphill left turn, and were finally there. It had taken an extra 20 minutes of time, and had worn on my nerves after all of the driving today. All I had wanted was a simple address to find.
The Sagritzerwirt Hotel
We parked and went into the hotel, it was quite nice inside. We checked in and the lady at reception told us we were getting an apartment, even though we had not reserved that nice of a room. We were not sure why, but we did not argue about it.
We headed upstairs but had a little issue finding our room, she had not given us very good directions, at least not that we could really understand. We went too far up and apparently in the wrong direction, but found a room called Apartment 1.
View From Our Balcony
We knew we were in an apartment, number 1, but the key did not work in the door. Our key had “Turm 1” printed on the tag, so we though this may not be our room, hoping we had not startled anyone inside while we were trying to get into the wrong door.
We walked down one level of stairs and went to the left, and right there was a door with the name Turm 1 on it, same as our key. We had obviously arrived at our room.
The apartment was huge inside, and we had a large balcony looking out at the nearby mountains. There was a large kitchen and also a second bedroom with two twin beds in addition the the master bedroom with a queen bed.
Small Catholic Church Next to our Hotel
We headed back to the car to bring up our luggage and get settled in. We put some wine into the freezer to cool down and headed outside to walk to the small country church that was next door. It was a small Catholic Church that had been built in 1839.
We headed back to the apartment and relaxed with a glass of wine on the balcony. I was feeling much better today, but Stephanie was starting to have more congestion, similar to me two days ago.
After a while, we headed down to the dining area to have dinner. The hotel was pretty far from any restaurants, so it had its own restaurant, we assumed mostly for guests. Everyone eating there seemed to be from the hotel. The menu looked pretty good. We ordered a 0.50 L beer each and ordered our dinner. I had the Austrian version of Cordon Blue, made with pork, and Stephanie had some type of boiled dumplings filled with a minced meat. Both were good.
Stephanie’s Dinner
We also ordered a Apfelstrudel for desert, which of course is apple strudel in German, along with a side of vanilla ice cream, It was good, but probably had been re-heated in a microwave. They charged the meal to the room, which was nice. We headed back upstairs to settle in for the night. We were planning on leaving around 9:30 AM tomorrow for our journey on the Grossglockner High Alpine Road.
Apfelstrudel For Dessert
We headed to bed about 10:00 PM. It had been a good day, but a little stressful with all of the driving.