Bye-bye Bavaria: Out of the beer mug and into the vineyards

If you’re going camping in lower Bavaria, go where the locals go. The locals go fishing. How we even arrived in this dorf of a burg remains something of a mystery, but I seem to recall something with a google. Last time I crossed Europe, a traveler needed to know how to read a map, but those days are over. Yes, I’m old-fashioned, but I love my Kindle.

While I spent an unreasonable amount of time considering the subtle psychological impact of replacing fold-out roadmaps with GPS voice navigation, my wife and copilot guided us right onto the soft lawn of the sparsely populated Angler’s Nest campground somewhere in the Bavarian region of Upper Palatinate, where we fit in about as well as a head of broccoli in a basket of breakfast rolls. But the good folks there were just as warm and welcoming as could be and assured us that the formalities of check-in were a lackadaisically low priority.

When the reception staff finally did track us down, it was clear that the young lady was making a concerted effort not to speak to me in the local Bavarian dialect, especially once she’d heard a little of my own German dialect, in which the words wriggle off my lips like night crawlers. Eventually, after patiently watching the slow removal of a splinter from our daughter’s hand, the receptionist was very happy to accept from us a negligible camping fee.

It was not until the next morning we realized that we had no breakfast, and that it was already Sunday, meaning that everything would be closed. Within a matter of minutes, my wife had directed us through a commercial industrial neighborhood of Regensburg and into the parking lot of possibly the only open bakery in the city. And soon we were sated with pastries and breakfast rolls.

Many more kilometers and untold inches of rain accompanied us out of Germany and into Austria. But rather than race on to our new hosts on the opposite side of this small country—smaller than the state of Maine—we decided instead to extend our road trip one more day and spend the night on a lakefront campground outside of Gmunden, a charming spa town which I’d mistakenly believed to have been named after one of the Seven Dwarves.

Unintelligible but harmless, the young man at the reception desk half mumbled to us in some sing-songy syllables that turned out to be German. Then we agreed to pay the premium and camp out in the rain, just to be on the shore of this enchanted mountain lake encircled by jagged alpine peaks stretching straight into the clouds.

And in the morning we ascended the mountain. More like one of the foothills maybe, but the tram conductor described an elevation increase of about 1500 meters. The view from the top of the mountain was equally majestic to the view from the lakeshore below, but the playground on the peak was far superior. Highest accolades went to the summer bobsled track down the mountain’s precipitous face, which had us howling with terrified delight.

We spent the next three or so hours driving through—not over, not around, but through—the stunning mountains of central Austria. Either in the rain, or in a tunnel, but usually a tunnel—some up to 8 and 10 km long—we worked our way southeasterly, undaunted by the weather and continually astounded by the incomparable scenery. Finally we made our way out of the high mountain range, right up to the border of Slovenia, and deep into the heart of Styria. The region of Styria is today comprised of southern Austria and northern Slovenia and boasts what you might call a “colorful ethnic history.”

Here we were greeted by rolling hills all but covered with tidy family-owned vineyards, reminiscent of San Luis Obispo’s similarly cultivated slopes. But here the hills are so much hillier, and everything a hundred times greener. This is where we found the exceedingly easy-to-miss driveway leading into the paradisal canyon occupied by our next hosts. Such a first impression only bolstered our already high expectations, based on what we knew about this family, their four children ages 1-12, and their pivotal role among the Austrian and international community of homeschoolers / free-schoolers / un-schoolers.