The second leg of our adventure saw us heading to Lake Hallstatt in Austria. We showed you the pictures before we left so you can only imagine how excited we were to see the beautiful scenery.

Whenever we do these European road trips, we always just pick a nice sounding town from the motorway signs and stop there for lunches. So we chose Kitzingen for a petrol and food stop. It was a fairly long drive so in the end we had a cheeky McDonalds for lunch and got back on the road. I ordered a box of 9 nuggets and they only gave me 8 so when I went back to let them know, they gave me 2 more…bonus nugget!

As we got closer to Austria we started to see signs for toll roads. I thought I would have a quick look online to check if you have to pay with cash/card and thank goodness I did. It turns out that they recently introduced a sticker system called a “vignette”. You have to buy and display the sticker in your car which cost us 14 Euros. It’s a good thing we found out about it early enough because if you get to a toll without a sticker, they can fine you up to 400 Euros!

Having checked the weather forecast, we were disappointed to find out that it was going to be cloudy and raining at the lake. Unfortunately that’s exactly what we found when we arrived there. This didn’t stop the lake from being so beautiful. We drove along long windy mountain roads – I was driving so you can imagine how calm Ads was as the passenger 😉

We arrived at our little guesthouse around 7pm and were incredibly disappointed by the look of it from the outside. It was a bit shabby and I was so worried that I had messed up as I booked all of the accommodation. We went inside and everything changed. The owner was a lovely lady who spoke English and checked us in. Our room was absolutely stunning with a lovely bed and gorgeous shower, and everything was purple! The owner asked us what time we would like breakfast so we arranged that for 9am and headed out to a local restaurant that she recommended. We had the most amazing dinner in this super cute Austrian restaurant which included goulash, shnizel and apple strudel.

We headed back to the hotel and watched the Barcelona game on my laptop. In the morning, we came downstairs for breakfast to find that the owner had laid out an entire buffet at our own private table. There was juice, fruit, different types of bread, meats and cheeses, yoghurts, pastries and cereals. I’ve never seen anything like it, and all just for us. She made us a cup of tea and coffee each and a boiled egg. We knew we had a long journey to Zagreb so Ads made a genius decision to make a ham and cheese sandwich and wrap it in a napkin to take for lunch in the car.

We walked across the road to the side of the lake to film a video and get some cool pictures. Even though it was cold and cloudy, it was still so lovely to see. We are planning to stop there on the way home as it will be sunny and even more beautiful. We checked out from our lovely little hotel and as we were packing up the car, we noticed that they were hanging wooden boards and cladding all round the outer pagoda. They were obviously mid-renovation which is why it looked so shabby when we arrived.

We checked our route which was taking us through Slovenia and it turned out that we needed another toll vignette sticker for Slovenia so we found a petrol station where we could buy one and set off on the road to Zagreb.