Visiting Innsbruck and the Austrian Tyrol

For my last couple of birthday's we have left behind the usually cold and grey London for a much sunnier Spain, however this year with London having one of the warmest Winter's on record, we decided to go in search of snow instead.

We left London early on a Saturday morning and arrived in Innsbruck, the capital of the state of Tyrol in Austria, just before lunch. We had stunning views of the Austrian Alps as we flew into Innsbruck, with the pilot seeming to slow down to give everyone an amazing view.

Innsbruck has only a tiny airport and is surrounded by tall mountains, and rivalled only by Santorini and Queenstown as the prettiest airport location we've flown into.

We were staying in Alpbach, a tiny alpine village about an hour and a half outside of Innsbruck, but before we continued our journey further into the Alps, we dropped off our bags at the train station and headed into Innsbruck to explore.

Everywhere in Europe seems to be having a much warmer winter than usual, and the temperature in Austria hovered between 2 - 10 degrees while we were there.

Usually there is snow everywhere at this time of the year, but there were huge patches of green around Innsbruck and we frequently found ourselves wandering outside without our heavy winter coats.

Innsbruck is full of beautiful brightly coloured buildings and the Old Town is easy to explore, making it easy to just wander without getting lost.

We stopped for lunch at a tiny place selling lots of different kinds of meat and cheese. Having already eaten on the plane we just grabbed a Speck sandwich, though looking around at the meat and cheese platters made me wish we'd skipped breakfast.

Innsbruck is only a small town, and easily explored in a couple of hours, so we headed back to the train station and hopped on the first train to Brixlegg, where we then got a taxi to Alpbach.

We were staying outside of the town, as usual, we very rarely end up staying close to town, preferring to stay in less touristy places. We were staying in the very cute Hotel Bergwald, who gave us a room with an amazing view out over Alpbach and the surrounding Alps.

Unlike the area around Innsbruck, everywhere was covered in snow and we felt like we were really in an alpine paradise!

After settling in, we headed down the road to the Hotel Rossmoos, where we had dinner all three nights we were there. Being only 5 minutes away from our hotel, it not only served fantastic Austrian food, but it was also much easier to navigate our way there in the dark than into town 20 minutes down the road.