By 4pm we were all together, car loaded and an expectency you could taste :)

With the destination loaded to the TomTom, we were expecting to arrive around 1am - boy how we were wrong.

As soon as we left the ring road we hit traffic, and bad traffic as what seemed like the entire Noord-Holland headed south and east desperate to escape the flat lands, we joined the throng and all the way down to Arnhem the jams continued.

By 9pm our arrival time was 3am - not good - we called the Wiwanni hut and Celine showed off her perfect German and explained the situation. The Wiwanni people were great and organised us a hotel room in the village, we'd sleep in the hotel and hike up to the hut in the morning - cool... or so we thought.

Seriously hard storms hindered us for the 1st half of Germany, with near zero visability traffic grinded to a halt, with multi car pile ups every 10k we litteraly swam our way south...

We later made good time through Germany :-) thanks to some professional driving and with only an hour left on the TomTom we were all awake and eager to arrive when the TomTom directed us to..


...a train station ! A TRAIN STATION wih a queue of cars at 2am... wtf... what is this?

We joined the queue and nervously thought about asking what the deal was. Celine came to the rescue again and discovered that we needed to get on a train through the mountain to be able to get to Ausserberg, ok well we'll just wait then. When's the next train?

6am !

Still recovering from the shock, and the realisation that to drive round would add an extra 3.5hours to the journey we were just about to accept that we were in for a night in the car when... the queue started moving... hey EXCELLENT, we followed the car in front glad that we didn't have to spend the night in the car - or so we thought.

Just about to board the train we were waiting for the next slot when Celine thought she'd ask the man in the flourescent jacket...

we watched...
flourescent man laughed...
Celine almost fainted...

- this was the train for Italy, WE had to wait till 6am. Damn !

We slowly drove to the 'waiting area' and ...erm... waited !



We killed time by tring to sleep, some of us spooning in the back, and me in the relative comfort of the front seat we just got to sleep when the alarm went off at 5am... we awoke !





And what a view greeted us, surrounded by mountains and clear(ish) skies we got our first view of a taste of things to come.

We headed off after a hearty b'fast of coffee and croissants soon forgetting our lack of sleep and once again dead keen to get going. The train was amazing, and pretty packed for the 5.50, we got on and giggled...

With little problem we found the parking point for Wiwanni and began the 1.5hour walk in. After little sleep and many hours being car bound we made good time and arrived at the hut at 9am, finally we'd arrived at the start !

The following days, proved everything you imagine an Alpine adventure should be, it was... unforgettable... magestic and most definately worthwhile :-)

Stay tuned for part 2...