Yet another beautiful day in prospect and it seemed a shame to spend it in the car, but we were looking forward to seeing more mountains and fir trees so off we went. Hubby decided he really didn't want to drive the lakeside road we had used on the way there, so we went down the autostrada nearly to Milan then headed north to Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Okay, it was quite a few kms further but the lack of stress was wonderful! 
 
There were great views as we drove up to Lake Lugano and even better ones as we accessed the San Bernadino tunnel – and as soon as we left Italy the traffic density halved and we had the road to ourselves at some points.
 
The autoroute swooped in and out of tunnels, round mountains and over bridges, gradually gaining height until we were at almost 2000m. Once over the pass we stopped at a Rastplatz where there was a little cafe selling Goulash soup, but when we got out of the car, we immediately put some warmer clothes on – the temperature had dropped nearly 17° and was now at 11.5!


 The soup warmed us up (as did the extra clothing) and we continued on to Liechtenstein; we crossed this tiny country in 20 mins and didn’t see too much of its mountain scenery as there was very low cloud everywhere, but we did stop to buy a vignette to allow us to use Austrian motorways, €8.50 for 10 days.



 Our destination was a site at Stams, just W of Innsbruck, which involved the A12 motorway but again we didn’t see too much of the scenery – three quarters of our journey was in tunnels! When we finally emerged, blinking in the sunlight we wondered if we had turned into moles....But we arrived safely at Camping Eichenwald on the side of the mountain at Stams. My site book described it as "behind the monastery & next to the dry ski jump", and that’s exactly where it was.


 

 It is a lovely site of individual terraces holding about 6 vans, and the terraces are so steep that each pitch has uninterrupted views across the valley to the high mountains opposite. The facilities are very clean and the owners friendly, so it made a good night halt and all for €20. One could spend ages just sitting drinking in the views, especially with the sun glinting off the golden domes of the monastery, so we had tea and did exactly that.

Our evening was punctuated by the sound of bells: the local cows wearing them round their necks sounded just like I imagined from those stories of Heidi I heard in my childhood, and also the monastery ones – shades of the Sound of Music!