Today was one of those days where you wake up in Italy, drive through Austria and Liechtenstein and end up in Switzerland.

This morning was our final day in Cortina. We had a wonderful time and I’d highly recommend a visit there to anyone!

After loading up the car we were on the road. After not too long, we got stuck behind a Fiat Panda cruising at 40 km/h under the speed limit. We could not get around this car. Traffic in the other direction was steady. We kept getting alerts on the radio warning about weekend traffic. We didn’t anticipate that we’d need to plan for this since we have never had issues with traffic in the past, but we’ve also never traveled here during the summer.

After we finally got past the panda, we were stuck in the holiday traffic which delayed us up to 40 minutes between the multiple slow downs.

We felt like we were making no progress and would be stuck in Italy forever.

Finally, things cleared up after our final toll booth in Italy and we were in Austria!

Unfortunately, we forgot that our 10-day vignette for Austria that we purchased on our first day here was now expired. Luckily, we realized this not long after entering Austria. Unfortunately, the closest location with a vignette to purchase required us to exit the freeway. Then the road we entered had a toll of almost $8. The vignette costs $10… we found the gas station that sold the vignettes and I hopped out of the car to purchase it.

The gas station attendant was a very friendly Austrian woman, but the card reader was not working. I had to run back out to the car to collect 10 euros from Jacob to purchase the vignette. All the while, a man sitting in the gas station restaurant watched me, the entire time…..creeper. After I collected the vignette, Jacob put it on the windshield and we were once again on our way!

Not long after that it was time to stop for lunch, even though it felt like we had made little progress. We stopped at a rest stop that had a restaurant where you ordered food or picked it out from the buffet. Jacob got a pretzel and apple strudel, and I got a bratwurst and fries. We split the food and it was yum!

After that we headed back out to make some progress toward our destination.

Things started to look a bit familiar and I realized that Jacob and I had driven this way six years ago when we were last here. I wrote about it in a previous post. There was just tunnel after tunnel and we again drove through Austria’s longest tunnel, the Arlberg Road Tunnel (incorrectly named in previous post) which is 15 km long. I spent this time mostly reading since the view was nothing but concrete.

In contrast from our journey in 2016, we drove through Liechtenstein. Last time we were here, we were concerned about driving through there without an international driver’s permit. We really shouldn’t have been worried though because I think it took us less than 20 minutes to get through the entire country.

Once we arrived in Switzerland it was time for a snack so Jacob pulled over at a rest stop. In Germany and Austria, you often need 50 cents to use the toilets so I made sure to grab out our coins and then realized we were in Switzerland now and they don’t use euros, they use francs. However, lucky for us the toilets were free!

We continued our tradition of only eating at McDonald’s when we are in foreign countries and both got McFlurries for the road.

Car photos rarely turn out well but I wanted to capture some of the sights during our journey.

We again passed through Lucerne, where we visited previous and turned before we got to Zurich. We took many twisty, windy mountain roads on our journey to Grindelwald.

After a very long day, we arrived in Grindelwald. Our AirBnB host marked our parking spot and apartment with a little marmot picture. Then two stuffed marmots greeted us on the couch at our arrival. Our view from the balcony is absolutely incredible! I’m really looking forward to our stay here.

Tomorrow Jacob wants to recreate our 2016 journey and see what has changed since we’ve been here. So, we will likely be walking through the Lauterbrunnen Valley again. I hope there are lots of cows and cats like last time!

Until then!