Exploring the towns on Lake Wolfgangsee

We have spent the last week in Croatia, so haven't had a chance to properly finish our Austrian trip! We are in the process of uploading our Croatian photo's onto the blog, but it takes a while. Hoping to have the first post up this week. Maybe.

So back to Austria... On Sunday we decided to explore the other towns on the shore of Lake Wolfgangsee. The horrendous rain from the previous day seemed to have cleared up and the sun was out, so we headed down to catch the ferry around the lake.

It was much busier in Sankt Gilgen than the day before, however the ferry wasn't crowded and we were able to grab a seat on the upper deck and enjoy the sunshine while we made our way to our first stop in the market town of St Wolfgang.

St Wolfgang is larger than Sankt Gilgen, and was considerably busier with a few tour groups departing with us from the ferry.

The town is popular in both Summer and Winter, and there were lots of people relaxing on the lakeside enjoying the sunshine.

We headed off in the exact opposite direction to the tour groups and explored the path along the lakeside for a while, enjoying the solitude. We eventually turned back to explore St Wolfgang.

Chickens!

The town was lovely to explore and we even managed to find a Christmas store filled with Nutcrackers and snow globes and all sorts of goodies.

I love that in Germany and Austria you can always find a Christmas store no matter what month you're in. I really have to restrain myself, otherwise we'd be coming home with boxes full of Christmas decorations.

We stopped for something to eat at a restaurant on the lakeside, finally deciding on the amazing Apfel Strudel and coffee.

We ate a lot of Strudel in Austria, along with copious amounts of Schnitzel.

We relaxed with our coffee's for a while and enjoyed watching the boats on the lake, we had a great time waving to all the Japanese tourists when they went past on the tour boats. They get so excited and it's awesome to have 50 people all waving at you from a boat!

After missing the ferry (literally by seconds!), we hopped on the bus and headed further South around the lake to Strobl.

Strobl is much smaller than the other two towns, and we saw the entire town in about 20 minutes! We went for a walk around the lake, it was getting hot and I was regretting not bringing my swimming togs, there were lots of other people swimming.

We stopped after a while so I could dip my feet in, and discovered there was no way I'd be swimming in there even if I'd brought my togs. It was freezing!

Still, it was nice to cool down my feet, but this was as close to the water as I got.

The walk around the lake was lovely, we could have walked back around to St Wolfgang as there is a nice walkway that goes right around the lake. However the last leg into St Wolfgang was along the main road, and it was really hot by this time. So we headed back into Strobl to sit in the sunshine and get an ice-cream.

We sat by the lake for a few hours, and enjoyed ice-cream, and also some hot chips and bratwurst which were delicious. We ended up spending a long time in Strobl, since we missed the afternoon bus, and had to wait almost two hours for the next one.

We didn't mind too much, since it was the first sunshine we'd had in a long time! London has been plagued by rain for months now and we're really getting sick of it!

We ended up getting the early evening bus back to Sankt Gilgen, and discovered at this bus station that we had both gotten quite sunburnt! We didn't have any sunscreen with us and it was easy to forget how strong the sun was! Plus it had been raining and overcast the two days before, so we weren't really expecting lovely sunshine.

Sunburnt!

We had an amazing dinner at the hotel next to ours, Entrecote and Schnitzel, plus coffee and hot chocolate for dessert.

Halfway through dinner the rain returned, and was absolutely bucketing down by the time we left. So we were lucky we had a brief respite from the rain, but it was hard to remember how warm and sunny it had been earlier when we were freezing and had to sprint home in the rain!