Europe - Innsbruck

Today's Garmin Step Mileage: 11 km

Sadly we say goodbye to Salzburg and continue in our adventures. However, we will find new adventures and discoveries as we travel to Innsbruck, Austria.

We were up early and hit the road at 830. Our host recommended travelling the side roads for most of our journey as today is a "travel day" for Austrians and the Autobahn will be busy and have many "checkpoints" along the way.

Taking her advice we picked a route that travelled on the-path-less-travelled, meandering through small towns and villages along the way. We travelled from Salzburg towards Bad Reichenhall on highway 21 (parallels the Autobahn 8 for a while). Once it gets past Bad Reichenhall is where the mountains really start to peak all around us. We travelled through the hamlet of St. Marin on the secondary road (178) and then onto St. Johann. It is nice to travel through the countryside and the little towns as you go. Once we got to St. Johann we headed a bit further south on 170 to the town of Kitzbühel.

Kitzbühel is a small medieval town that is situated in the Kitzbühel Alps along the river Kitzbüheler Ache in Tyrol, Austria, about 100 kilometers (62 mi) east of the state capital Innsbruck. Kitzbühel is a ski resort of international renown and its ski season, lasting from mid

October to early May.

Ken Read was a lifelong Calgary resident a member of the Canadian alpine ski team from 1973 to 1983 and competed in two Olympic Winter Games. Read was part of the "Crazy Canucks", the Canadian downhill team of the late 1970s and early 1980s, that consistently challenged the Europeans with a daring racing style.

Read's first World Cup top ten finish came in January 1975 in a combined event at Kitzbühel. Later that calendar year, he became the first Canadian (and North American) to win a men's Downhill World Cup race, a downhill in Val-d'Isère, France on December 7, 1975, where he was one of four Canadians to finish in the top ten. Read went on to win four more World Cup downhill races and his point total for the 1980 season placed him second in the downhill final standings. He was the first non-European to win both the Austrian downhill Hahnenkamm at Kitzbühel and the Swiss race Lauberhorn at Wengen. His outstanding season in 1980 was marred by an unfortunate binding release, just fifteen seconds into the Olympic downhill where he was considered the gold-medal favourite.

We toured around the small town of Kitzbühel before heading back on our journey towards Innsbruck. What a quaint little village. From here we headed back west on the 170 and onto the Autobahn to Innsbruck. We arrived into Innsbruck at 12 pm and checked into 0ur

hotel - Stage 12 Hotel.

Accommodations: $400 Euros for 2 days, including breakfast.

The hotel is located in the centre of old town, with it's original facade on the main pedestrian esplanade. The new addition and current main building is built off the main street and faces onto a quiet courtyard. This is a place where we chose to splurge a bit on accommodations. The hotel has many nice touches and a full complement breakfast. All they had to do is tell me that they have a cappuccino machine and I'm in! They have great underground parking available and a spa area with both a dry and wet hot sauna rooms. It's going to be a great place to stay for a couple of days.

Once we arrived and got settled in we headed over to the local Innsbruck Tourist Information for a bit more info about the area. We strolled through the old town streets for a bit before making it back to our hotel. The main pedestrian esplanade had a really interesting reading fair on. There were bean bag chairs up and down the street and multiple book stations along the promenade. Many people were just hanging out reading books. Very cool!

Well tomorrow is going to be a fun filled tourist day from sun up to sun down, visiting a few of the wonderful mountain tops this great town is surrounded by.