Running a hotel is a strange business. You just about get ready to start the summer season. The hotel DIY is done, the kitchen is ready, the furniture is on the terrace and the sun is shining down in its wonderful Carinthian style. So it should be time to relax in the sun with a [...]

Press release begins: I can announce that the last tile has been laid at Gasthof Hochalmspitze.  This momentous event, the culmination of so much effort by so many people, took place at 17.52h yesterday, Saturday May 4th at a small private ceremony. The location of the actual “last” tile is not to be revealed. Each [...]

Many of you will already have met our friend and partner-in-biker-fun, Mike Molony and his lovely wife Brenda, seen in the featured photo last September on the Großglockner ride out during their 2011 Europen Tour (staying with us for 5 nights of it of course!) If you don’t know Mike, we recommend you have a [...]

…… well let’s start with this wonderful photo of the Lago de Predil in early May – gloriously unspoiled by anything other than the occasional visiting tourist and one of our favourite stops halfway round our 3 Countries Tour. By the time we get here we have already crossed into Slovenia via the Würzen Pass [...]

First of all we would like to wish you a Very Happy New Year! Hopefully, despite the doom and gloom in the media, the Mayan predictions of impending disaster and the increasingily strange global weather patterns, we will look back on 2012 as another great year for biking, hiking and generally enjoying the Carinthian hospitality! [...]

She may be already back in the UK, but she left this little gem behind for your entertainment, dear reader! AND a promise of Chapter 10 to come yet! Ch. 9 – Destiny grants us our wishes, but in it’s own way, in order to give us something beyond our wishes Sunday, as those who [...]

Chapter 8 – On This Loveliest Day of Days The title for this comes from “Shelter”, which is billed as the national anthem of the Federal Commonwealth of Sirocco, a New Zealand micronation.  No, I’d never heard of Sirocco either but doubtless there are people out there who have visited it.  The link, if you [...]

Chapter 7 –Tangled Up In Blue Title courtesy of Bob Dylan – Tangled Up in Blue – You Tube.  If you cite your source, it’s not plagiarism.  Technology, despite my avowed Luddite default, does have it’s uses.  The song finishes: “we always did feel the same, just saw it from a different point of view”.  [...]

Chapter 6 –  Family And Other Animals With apologies to Gerald (Durrell for the uninitiated – google it, oh alright I know life is short, so you would find: When the unconventional Durrell family can no longer endure the damp, gray English climate, they do what any sensible family would do: sell their house and [...]

…………but in battalions.  Bit like buses really, wait ages for one and then lots come at once.  I have just posted chapters 3 and 4 of this year which due to a misunderstanding (mine, naturally) have just been sitting there like Patience on a monument waiting for something to happen to them (and a slight [...]