The Alps

Crossing the border from Germany to Austria, we got our first glimpse of the this spectacular mountaing range. The Alps stretch through 7 countries - from east to west - Slovenia, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Germany, and France (and yes, Liechtenstein is a country)!

I was in awe at my first glimpse and was so glad we decided to drive to Austria at the last minute to see this amazing sight! Kelly's Mountain is no comparison to what I witnessed here!

Once into the Alps, we drove through a ton of small communties that were totally based on ski tourism. In some spots, we'd be driving down a road with mountains surrounding us on all sides and looking at the mountains, all you could see were ski lifts....it was hard to tell where they started and where they stopped, but the mountains were filled with skiers at every angle. The most popular ski town we passed through was St. Anton where we read they have 600 hotels in the area....now this was a small town - we drove through in about 4 minutes, but it was scattered with hotels. We had to go about 25km/hr because people were everywhere carrying skis and walking around in their ski boots - I have a craving to go skiiing in St. Anton now and have made it one of my goals!

We spent alot of the day driving through the alps and through some snowy areas. I was much calmer driving through the snow at this point in time, since we were mostly at the base of the mountains and not at the top this time. I'm not sure of the elevation we reached while driving, but the highest mountain in Austia reaches almost 3800 metres. We stopped the car numerous times to get some pictures and spent most of the day gazing out the windows!