Glacial awareness

With our new objective of returning to the UK in one piece and in time to catch our flight to Asia, we left Croatia and drove straight through poor old Slovenia without stopping. This was a shame because from what we could see it was actually a surprisingly lovely country and we felt slightly rude for ignoring it. Two hours later we were back in Austria and back to "civilisation" – by which I mean we were passing easy-to-find campsites, with lots of amenities, every few miles. We ended up at one, just outside Lienz, that had a washing machine (we'd not done laundry for weeks and the van was getting a little bit whiffy), a bar and, more importantly in the continuing heat, a swimming pool. There is something slightly thrilling about bobbing around in a pool at the foot of a mountain.

Driving through the endlessly dramatic scenery is an amazing experience but the steep inclines and winding hairpin bends are taking their toll on the van. We had a scare with the brakes coming down one such mountain pass when the ability to stop seemed to be leave us just as a strange burning smell seemed to arrive. We managed to stop, gingerly, at a garage in the next village and a very helpful chap came out to investigate. He took a wheel off, had a poke around and gave us the good news that our brakes were fine but the bad news that they were burning very hot. He asked what gear I had been in coming down the mountain. Now, the Ebay van is an American vehicle and as such has an automatic gearbox. I just stick it in "D" and go. I'd always wondered what the "2" and the "1" were for but our Austrian mechanic explained that these were low gears to help you go slower coming down steep hills – he seemed amused by the fact that I'd been relying on brakes alone. I felt such an idiot. He also asked if we'd been hearing a squeaking sound. We had. A very annoying squeaking sound. For weeks. He showed us a rubber thing that should have been cushioning a metal thing and told us that the rubber thing was no longer cushioning that metal thing. It was all very technical. In order to solve this problem he disappeared inside his workshop and, with a very dramatic shower of sparks, started grinding away at a piece of metal he'd found lying around. He reappeared having fashioned a new bracket to hold the rubber thing in place so that it would once again cushion the metal thing. As far as I was concerned, the man was a magician. He also managed to make €60 disappear from my wallet.

We drove on, in blissfully squeakless silence, through the mountains and forests, via the awesome waterfall at Kimml, and on to Mayrhofen. We thought it might be a fun idea to go snowboarding on the glacier at Hintertux, just a few kilometres up the road – imagine, snowboarding in the August sunshine! Unfortunately, imagine is all we could do as the moment we left for Hintertux it started pouring with rain and blowing a gale so they closed the cable car and all the pistes. We were gutted. We've seen nothing but blazing sunshine for over four weeks – this was a shock to our systems. It was also a shock for the van which subsequently started springing a whole host of new leaks. Our solution? Let's cover the whole damn thing in tarpaulin! This unconventional and slightly embarrassing approach was garnering a lot of mocking stares from the "proper" campervanners on site as we battled against the hurricane-strength wind with the acre or so of blue tarpaulin we'd bought. But, amazingly, it worked. We just look a bit silly is all.

We waited a day, sheltered from the rain under our new blue "van cosy", and the next morning woke especially early to catch the first lift… only this time, even though the rain had stopped, the fog was so bad that we couldn't even see the mountains from the campsite. So we gave up and drove toward Germany in a sulk.