Well, we survived the train trip, although at about 2am Mark realised that he'd left the straps that hold his luggage together on the bike. The same bike that was strapped to the outside of a train that was doing 120mph with a driver who cornered like Lewis Hamilton. So that could be a disaster when we get to Vienna.
Heidi, our waitress told us that she'd wake us up an hour before we arrived and serve us breakfast. Yea, right. We woke up 30 mins before arriving and had to sing for our food. Luckily we were on the only German train in history that was late so we had time to scoff our noms.
We arrived and checked the bikes and 3 out of 4 of Mark's straps had survived and we found the 4th about 10 bikes back. Phew.
It had rained so wet roads greeted us in Austria, but as we got out of the city things soon dried up.
We hit the motorway out of the city and took it easy, there was a steady flow of cars overtaking us and everyone was giving us the thumbs up like we were the first bikes they'd ever seen. However, their driving was awful with cars cutting us up and driving up our arses.
News must have got around that we were here as we kept seeing signs for Gute Fahrt!
We had enough of motorways so we fueled up and hit the mountain roads. We blasted past a few cars and got held up behind 3 cars, we were about to nail them coming out of a corner when the police jumped out with a speed gun and pulled the car at the front of us. Abort abort brake brake brake!!! Phew.
We then found the road of everything. 30km of hair pins, fast bends, mountains, 200kph straights, it had the lot, and we finally got to open up the bikes.
After a quick drink we hit the road for the run into Graz, more great roads, except for one bit. Tommo was leading and doing about 100mph when the tarmac ended and there was about 100m of dirt Road. Steve got down to a sensible speed but Mark flew past him hitting it at about 60mph. It was one of those moments where you knew that if you hit either brake, throttle or clutch you'd be on the floor, so we just rolled through and survived to live another day.
We pushed on to Graz with the stats showing 1000km and 9 hours on the bikes.
We checked in to find a basic room, but it was the shower that was wierd, it was off the bedroom and had a clear glass door! So we made the rule that whomever wasn't in the shower had to watch the TV with the volume on max in order to avoid the use of eye bleach.
It was 2pm and therefore beer time so we rocked up at a bar. This is where we discovered that noone in Austria knows what their wifi password is as whatever they write down or tell you doesn't work.
Steve has a reputation for going to see bridges that look like, well, bridges. This time however he came up trumps with a wierd floating bridge that had an orchestra on it.
We then did some sight seeing and went up one of those vertical train things.
At the top there was a sky bar which had stunning views, and we stumbled upon a metal concert which was an odd find. We did our best to blend in but I think we stood out a bit.
It was about 6pm now and Mark realised that he hadn't eaten since breakfast so was immediately starving. We roamed the town for a while and found a cool bar to eat in.
Steve has gone native, scoffing half a dozen pretzels, had pork for every meal and Mark was sure he saw him eyeing up some leather shorts.
More beers were had and we ended up in an Irish bar where the Austrians sung Irish songs (badly). We got talking to a guy who was happy and then we asked him what he did and it turned out he'd been made redundant and then he was no longer happy. We backed away slowly and left dodge.
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