St. Moritz, Switzerland - Fernpass, Austria

Sunday 20th June 1999

We fired up the engine this morning and all seemed well. As a quick test we wisely decided to head away from the town and up the Bernina pass towards Italy. We were lured on by the site of another towering snow-capped peak and we thought we'd like to get a little closer. After travelling about 10 k's or so we found a great view point and the van seemed to be behaving so we stopped for a few minutes then turned around and headed for Austria instead.

The road towards Austria took us through the heart of traditional Graubünden and we stopped off in a couple of villages to admire the colourful houses. They used an unusual decoration style called Sgrafitto which involved scratching the pictures and designs into the paint.

From there we continued our journey into Austria which turned out, apart from a brief bit of confusion over whether we should buy a motorway pass (we didn't), to be uneventful. At this point we were actually heading for a brief foray into southern Germany. Still, we stopped for the night in Austria, on the side of pass steeply climbing over another mountain range. As night fell we even saw a bit of Austrian wildlife, a fox running across in front of the car.