The hills were alive with the sound of music. Or were they screams of terror?

After 7 days and 4 countries Mark finally convinced me to have a turn behind the wheel of our left hand drive car. Previously my experience had been 2 very short stints in campground car parks.

Crossing from Italy into Austria this morning Mark declared that Austrian drivers were far more sedate than French and Italian ones (the speed is still 130km/ h but they are not as assertive or so quick on the horn). So I bravely took the wheel for some highway driving.

I think I will leave the city driving to Mark for a while longer though!


Gayle

After 3500 km in 9 days the inevitable finally happened. Leaving Vienna in the morning peak traffic we heard a loud "bang!" and there was our passenger side mirror swinging in the breeze by two wires. It happened that quickly none of us quite realised what had happened. Our best guess was that we had clipped the driver's side mirror of a parked car. With a horrible sick feeling in our stomachs and caught in the flow of the traffic it took us a little while to get the GPS reprogrammed so that we could get back to the "scene of the crime".

Finally we got turned around and back to our starting point to retrace our steps. And then we saw it - a black BMW (bloody hell!) illegally parked on the side of the road with a BMW service vehicle pulling in behind it.

With a sense of dread Gayle and I got out to talk to the owner. As it turns out the owner couldn't understand a word of English but the mechanic, who was there to change the flat tyre could. We explained to him what we thought we had done but fortunately (either because it is automatic In BMW's or because the owner had had the foresight to do it) the side mirror was already turned against the side of the car and a close examination revealed not a scratch on it. Phew!

Feeling a little better we resumed our journey to Budapest.



The damage - a little bit of black paint on the very end of the mirror.

Mark

Location:Austria