Eastern Euro road trip – Day 1 – Austria to Slovenia

Last updated: 25 June 2023

It all started upon landing in Vienna to commence our road trip across Eastern Europe.   The Boy and I were exhausted from our pre-dawn flight but very eager to know if our road trip was going to come to fruition.  We’d heard mixed reports about non-EU drivers being able to hire cars without an International Driving Permit, so we stood there at the car hire desk and waited bated breath…

Success! We collected our car and so happy to see that we’d scored ourselves a brand spanking new Mercedes Benz A class. The first challenge of the day was to learn how to drive on the right.

Vienna was a challenge. Traffic, trams, impatient pedestrians, confusing signage was simply the beginning all made worse by driving on ‘the wrong side’ of the road.  I was keen to find a park to explore the city. 6 laps of the city park, countless wrongturns, a close call with a pole or two and we found a street park.

Camera in hand we strolled through the old streets of Vienna.  It had this old world charm, St Stephen’s cathedral with it’s coloured tile roof and of course, it’s that time of year where Christmas markets are in full swing. Go for the beer or the mulled wine, leave the bratwurst alone. They’re THE worst! That’s €10 I’d happily not spend again. Jaded by my experience we headed for the car.

The plan was to not spending more than a day in Vienna, I know it’s worthy of more, but we always had time at the end to revisit Vienna… or so we thought.

Leaving Vienna we headed for Bled, Slovenia.  It was less than ideal driving conditions.

It was like this, heavy torrential driving for hours.  Being my turn to drive, The Boy snoozed while I battled this. Minutes felt like hours as the windscreen wipers whizzed past my face at maximum speed, squinting ahead trying to work out where those red taillights went, hugging the slow lane which seemed to be moving much quicker than the 110km/h I was used to, and wishing I was anywhere else but here. I found myself muttering “I knew we should have gone to the Caribbean”.

While route planning we’d discussed going via Graz since it was home to The Boys childhood idol, Arnold Schwarzenegger. It wasn’t in the plan, but isn’t that what roadys are about?  Tired of driving in such awful conditions I took the Graz exit on the motorway, Googled the address and headed off to find this museum, or Ode to Arnie as I fondly referred to it.  The Boy woke up to find us on a very dark, deserted road.  It wasn’t just dark, it was black.  No street lights, no houses.  We hit the small village of Thal and found the museum. It was closed. Bugger.

We had two options: try and find a B&B to stay the night in Graz or stop make a pledge to return one day and keep going.  We snapped a couple of pictures of the impressive Arnie statue and continued on to Slovenia.

The Boy jumped online to find us a hotel for the night, and found one reasonably priced with Lake frontage.  That’s the advantage of doing such a trip in Winter.  There’s no crowds, off peak prices, and nearly everything has last minute availability.

And then we arrived in Bled.