DAY 108 WEDNESDAY JULY 11 INTO THE ALPS

We loved the little Hotel Petri in Munich with its helpful staff,  huge breakfast buffet, and subdued but very old architecture.  The dining room wall was all solid beams jointed together and outshone our post and beam at home. It was supporting a 4 story building.

We could easily have spent three more days here; we particularly were interested in Regensburg because Bevan told us it was full of old buildings.  But there are other countries on the list and we were looking forward to train trips in Switzerland.  We boarded a train at 9.30 which was heading for Verona and Bologna in Italy, but we got off in Innsbruck and boarded another big train that had started in Vienna and would terminate in Zurich.  We got off this one at Sargan and got on another long train that had come from we never found out where and terminated at Chur, where some of the Alpine trains begin.  Our trains followed the Inn River for much of the way, gradually rising till we reached a peak of 1300 metres at St Anton Am Arlberg.  We took some photos from the train as we climbed:

As we choofed into St Anton the train went into a tunnel and emerged right at the station.  Malcolm jumped onto the platform for this photo:

while Lyn got this one through the window:

Not much chance of sighting a Crazy Kanguruh in there.  As soon as we took off the train went into a tunnel for 9 minutes so nothing further was visible.  A couple more shots as we descended to 600 meters:

A good day's scenery watching.  The only exercise today was finding our way from the hotel to Chur station ready for tomorrow's Bernina Express into Italy and back.  We have a lovely room here at $150 per night which is cheap for Switzerland.  The TV has Stations from four languages:  German, Italian, French and English.  We watched Inspector Rex without subtitles and wondered why Malcolm got nothing from the dialogue until it dawned on us that the show was dubbed into Italian!