Fri, 03 Oct 2003

author Liz	location Lyon, France
posted 19:31 CEST 10/10/2003	section Europe2002/Europe/Liechtenstein ( all photos )

Around Liechtenstein (almost completely) ( 27 photos )
When we woke up on Friday morning, the weather wasn't looking too good. The sky was very overcast and it was raining on and off. We had breakfast at the hostel and also decided to stay another night at the hostel. But instead of staying on the double room, we decided to switch to the dorm rooms to save some money. However, the guy at the desk said it was too much trouble, so he let us stay in a double room for the dorm bed price! Bargain.
From the hostel, we hired a couple of bikes as this seemed like quite a good way to see most of the country. The brakes and gears all worked, and the bikes even had a lock-up system to leave them outside and so on, and lights for night-time.
We rode a short way down the road to Vaduz first. Vaduz is the capital of Liechtenstein, but is still just a tiny town. We looked in a few of the shops, and that was about it.
The whole of Liechtenstein seems to fit quite neatly in a long valley with Austria on one side and Switzerland on the other. And because it is in the valley, there are huge towering and very beautiful mountains all around. Even though the weather was pretty awful, the mountains looked so tall and it was nice to see clouds floating across and covering up the little hillside villages.
From Vaduz, we could see the Royal Castle nestled in between the hills up on the mountainside. We kept riding south, stopping at a Tourist Information to get Liechtenstein stamps in our passports, riding part of the way up a steep hillside and then giving up, and stopping to get a loaf of bread and jar of jam from a small supermarket. We also stopped quite regularly to dodge the frequent rain showers. At some stage we went and found a bike track going right along side the Rhine River, which is also the border with Switzerland. We came to a bridge and crossed over to Switzerland - a new country! Unfortunately it was still raining in Switzerland, so we crossed back over into Liechtenstein.
We ended up riding all the way down to the southern tip of the country, and came to another border with Switzerland. We rode into the little town of Balzers and got really wet from heavy rainfall. From then on the rain was almost constant, and it got colder too, but we were still keen to see lots more.
We just kept riding and riding, accidentally got lost in someone's farm, stopped under trees to try to shelter from the rain and got very wet! We also went back out to the Rhine and rode alongside it. The sun came out for about ten minutes, which warmed us up quite a bit, but then the clouds closed in again.
After a really long day of riding, lots of kilometres, wet clothes and sore bums we made it back to the hostel where we had nice hot showers and relaxed for a few hours.
We were going to get some food from the local supermarket for dinner as the hostel didn't have a kitchen, but the supermarket didn't really have much food, so our last resort took us to a nice restaurant just near the hostel. It wasn't as cheap as cooking for ourselves, but the food was delicious and for fifteen euro we each a huge bowl of soup, bread, salad, and a beautiful main with sliced beef and cheese noodles. It was all really rich and tasty food, and we really enjoyed it all.
We went back to the hostel going past the cows in the field with the tinkling cowbells, and had a good night's sleep.

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