Day two of the Jaufenpass brought us over the pass, down the other side, and possibly on the plane home again, shattering what remains of our pride...read on to find out why...

The walk up to the Jaufenpass, our next target, was going to take us up 800m along a roughly 4km ridge, then up another 300m before plunging us back into civilisation.

Wow, a journal about two people walking with some actual walking in it? Click below or above to read on...

After getting back to Italy, the following few days were spent in a limbo between work and play...Julia had some work to finish and to find a power socket we were forced to trek into the library every day. It was a strange modern building that was a bit like an elongated greenhouse filled with odd overgrown plants and trees and had been built as a complex with the town theatre, but the most interesting thing about this library (I wonder if anyone's personal interest has sustained them this far) was the (wait for it) books.

If it was, click below or above or here to read on...

Sitting in the lee of a motorway for lunch, easily our least pleasant location to date, we looked at the map in horror. We had grossly mistaken the amount of time it would take us to reach our next target, Sterzing-Vipiteno. We had estimated about a week – we now realized that it'd be a stretch to say two days.

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The Sattelberg Alm website

Bear with me on this, but when I first saw the Sattelberg Alm, I almost cried with disappointment. I had gone ahead to make sure we could get a bed or two and as I bounded up to the door I saw the sign that had become so familiar back in Steinach. It amounted to “Closed until summer.”

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A perfectly-timed catastrophic data loss topped off my week today and trying in vain to happily resolve this has tired me out a bit, so instead of going for words I have decided to produce a map to clearly demonstrate exactly what's going on. In the typical nature of such things, a bright idea like that only took more time and added little, infuriating me. This has eased my tiredness. (I wrote this about a week ago, and it's a testament to my fear of minor graphics bodges that I have not posted it until now - it took me that long to work up the courage to put a few squiggly lines over a google map. Pity Me.)

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Before anyone wonders, we're still not in Italy and I am still writing this in Innsbruck - that's a good thing though, it means that Julia is actually able to do her job from abroad and we are not going to go broke in a week.

So...the nights were still cold, and my sleeping bag was getting more and more broken. We had found a way of stuffing all our clothes under ourselves to warm up and it was mostly working. In any case the coldness of the nights was more than made up for by the lovely mornings...

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JP is doing the great Everything We've Been Up To post and I am trying to cover half a dozen other things so this is just a list of my thoughts or fun things I have seen (in no particular order):

Take a look at a map, of Austria maybe...or perhaps go searching on Multi map. Innsbruck to Steinach isn't very far. It's about 30mins on the train, If you're buying maps in 1:50,000 scale, which we are, it's just over half of one - our whole journey should, if completed, take about 100. The paths we took, for the most part look easy enough, and generally led south, it's April and we felt well-prepared. Why then did it take us six days? Why are we back in Innsbruck as I write this? Have we given up already?

Read on for the answers to all, some, or none of those questions...

So, we're off on Wednesday. Time for packing and panicing, but also time for one last day out.

Kentwell Hall has such great potential to be completely rubbish. It has given itself all the opportunities in the world to be bloody terrible; it holds costumed re-enactments of Tudor life in the grounds and house that is currently being lived in by a modern family. They have frescoes of their children on the walls and items of such horrifically bad taste strewn about the insides and occasionally in the grounds that should jar so badly with the period costumes and oddish bagpipe-like-things droning on in background...somehow they don't.

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