September 15-18: The fishing trip

September is a month we don't usually travel much at work as there are heaps of meetings as many of our Member States come in to Vienna for the General Conference and it is  a good chance to sit down with their delegations and plan the future.

Anyway we had a holiday on Friday 16th to mark the end of Ramadan (we are an international organisation after all and so our public holidays are a rather eclectic mix).  My colleague and friend Russ from the USA had arranged a fishing trip but  was short of  companions to travel with so I agreed to go along, although it was  quite a while since I had been fishing. So Thursday after lunch we set off .............

The chosen venue was a small town called Mittersil,  the other side of Salzburg, about 4.5 hours drive from  Vienna.  The hotel was small family place which specialises in fishing  and walking  tours for guests. http://www.hotel-hirschenwirt.at/

We arrived to see that the weather was closing in  but the accommodation was good and the meals fine - and the local beer very good.  The town is on the edge of the Hoehn Tauen National Park and I was hoping to see some interesting birds as this is one of the locations where lammergeiers have been released back to the wild. The Friday morning dawned cloudy and cool with a hint of rain, not great fishing weather; and the valley was full of low cloud..............

......................... but we headed off anyway to a small lake that Russ had fished before.

Russ at the Elizabethsee lake - raring to go

The place was  very scenic and the water so clear we could see many monster rainbow trout and  heaps of good sized brown trout. there were a few other anglers who used dry flies but Russ and I used spinners of many types, shapes, colours and sizes. Sadly the fish were really not biting, although Russ did catch one......

One of our fellow fishermen casting a dry fly

Some of the many fish that "got away"; the large rainbow trout was about 60-65 cm long!

.................and Russ with a brown trout that did not escape!

We eventually tried another spot but the water there was very cloudy so we decided   it was time for another beer.............................

Saturday was brighter but we set out after breakfast to drive over the Grossglockner high alpine road. We had both been there before but it was so good a day we went again. The drive up was superb  with clouds hanging in the valleys, snow on the peaks and a zillion motorbikes queuing up at the toll gate to do the drive with its multitude of hairpind bends and  curves..

We stopped to admire the view and then the cars arrived. It turned out that we were sharing the road with a classic sports car rally organised by the RAC from the UK; and the first few cars were  catching us up - a Ferrari  and a Porsche...

As the drive went on we saw many more  classic cars but few turned off to go to the hishest point on the road...............

.................but we did.............

Fom the viewpoint you get a superb view of the Grossglockner peak - the highest mountain in Lower Austria.

The road is reknowned for the bends and curves.............

At the other side of the mountain we took the side road up to the Franz Josef glacier. In the car park there we found many of the classic cars - AH3000 DB2-4, Porsche 365, Jaguar XK 140 and 150 and an E=type,  Ferraris and a Corvette......................

The glacier seemed smaller than a few years ago and has shrunk an amazing amount since the pictures we saw  in the exhibition centre that had been taken in the 1950s.

As always there were plenty of marmots running around and sunning themselves;  but despite our patient efforts we saw no mountain sheep or large birds.

The days journey ended in Klagenfurt, a small town that we had been told was very pretty. We found the hotel and went for a walk..  The main square was dominated by this statue and the air reverberated to the sound of the many Harley Davidson motorbikes passing through, either  going to or coming from the  road we had just traversed.

The rest of the old town was very scenic and we saw thus house dedicated to the man who invented the european printng press, Mr. Guttenberg

We found a very nice italian restaurant for dinner and retired to the hotel with some beers (cheaper from the supermarket than the minibars in the hotel).

Sunday morning we set out after a leisurely breakfast and made the 350 odd km trip back to Russ's place at Langensersdorf north of Vienna in time for him to lunch with his family.  A good end to a weekend that had been very pleasant despite not catching the fish  we had anticipated.