Taking the Long Way From Vienna to Zurich
Five countries, a thousand kilometers — and all for €1
I’m normally against this kind of thing
Back in the dark days of Covid-19, we found ourselves trapped. My wife and I had been planning to move to France and had even visited to scout out properties in February 2019. We were back in Canada when the pandemic closed its leathery wings over us, shutting out the suddenly silent sky.
Flattening the curve turned into sheltering in place turned into a strange new way of life with no end in sight. And while I frothed at the mouth and climbed the walls of our rented house, my wife suggested we live in a van for a while.
Everyone was doing it. Or at least talking about it. A way to reclaim some of the freedom the pandemic cost us, and a way to reject the ultimately soul-destroying lives we are taught as children to pursue. My wife and I both work remotely, so we can do things like that. All we really need is an Internet connection.
Understand: she’s Canadian. And in every Canadian’s heart burns this shared national dream of the Road Trip. To take off and explore one of the world’s most vast and underpopulated countries, free to go wherever you like or wherever the road will take you.
It doesn’t have the same appeal for me.
I stopped camping a few years back. Every year that passes, I get more partial to a comfortable bed, a warm shower, a toilet that flushes. Defecating in an outhouse bristling with mosquitoes and waking in the thick torpor of the sunless morning at every snap of a twig is no longer my idea of fun.
We never did take that Covid-era Canadian road trip. The pandemic slowly fizzled out, and we moved to France at last.
This Christmas, though, I was reminded of that van idea when I saw an advert for camper van rental.
I can’t resist a deal.
And this was a good one. Roadsurfer rents camper vans across Europe, with most of their depots in Germany. At the end of the travel season, this leaves them with vans scattered across the continent, with no easy way to get them back to Germany to start renting them out again.
So they rent vans at Christmas time with specific itineraries. You pick up the van in one city and drop it off in another. Getting there and back is up to you. They have several trips to choose from, taking in Spain, France, Italy, Germany, and beyond. And a week’s camper van rental, including unlimited kilometers and an additional driver, costs €1.
To drive from Graz, Austria, to Konstanz, Germany, takes less than eight hours by the most direct route. But we had a week to make the journey. And in that part of south-central Europe, a drive of only a couple of hours changes everything.
The journey begins
First, we flew to Vienna.
As far as European capitals go, it’s massively underrated. Its beautiful Habsburg bones show gaunt in the winter floodlights, and time drags slow in the gorgeous cafés.
There was a time not too long ago when, like Paris, like London, like New York, this city shaped the history of the world. When Freud and Trotsky and Hitler and Stalin drank in those same cafés and formed ideas that created the world we live in now. 20th-century history was written here, and in some ways, we all still live in the shadow of the vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire.
When you step out from the Metro station to hear the harmonious thunder of the bells from St. Stephen’s Cathedral, when you pay far too much for mulled wine from the Christmas market, when you wander under glittering chandeliers that turn the gleaming streets into the frozen ballrooms of some endless palace, you feel that historic heartbeat all around you.
But make sure you bring a forgiving credit card with you because like most European capitals these days, Vienna is astronomically expensive.
We didn’t stay for long. After all, we had a van to pick up. But we had an evening in Vienna to get fleeced at the Christmas market under the clanging bells of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, and that’s better than nothing.
Van life
The train ride from Vienna to Graz is beautiful. It winds its way through the mountains south of the capital, rising above the snow line while we gaze down on towns we’ll never see with names we’ll never know.
Graz, probably, is a perfectly nice town in its own right, but we wouldn’t know. From the train station, we took a cab straight to the parking lot where our van waited.
There, we met another couple, she Austrian, him Bosnian, about to set off on their own adventure down to Sicily. When the Roadsurfer representative arrived, he had the stressed, harried look of vehicle rental personnel around the world. But he showed us how to turn on the heat in our van, how to raise the roof to access the sleeping attic, how to change the onboard computer from German to English.
And then, we were off.
My wife did the driving. In fact, I barely drove the van once on the whole trip. I can read in the car and she can’t, so while she drives, I researched and booked ahead, figuring out where we would stay and where we would go and what we would do when we got there.
Our first stop was Ljubljana.
Slovenia isn’t technically on the way from Graz to Konstanz, but we had time on our hands. Annoyingly, Slovenia is a country I have been to before, but my wife hadn’t, meaning she gained a position on me in the ongoing contest we have over who’s visited more countries.
I can’t catch her now. Not unless I embark on a massive solo tour of South America and the Caribbean, to all the places she’s been and I haven’t. After visiting Slovenia together, all I have over her now is Ireland, and I have a feeling that’s not going to last long.
Our first night was spent in a fairly charmless truck stop surrounded by warehouses on the outskirts of the Slovenian capital. Stepping out of the van in the early morning, I found myself being watched through the fence by a large man silently smoking in the yard of a warehouse. And in the freezing shower block, steam curled off my body in the freezing air, making me feel like a Balrog prematurely woken by nasty hobbits.
Already, I’d learned several valuable lessons about van life.
The first was that you need to really get along with the person you’re sharing the vehicle with. Me and my wife spend 24 hours a day most of the time anyway, but we usually do it in a four-bedroom house. The office on the top floor where I work all day couldn’t be much further from her ground floor lair, so we hardly see each other until the evening, like a normal couple.
In a van, on the other hand, there is no escape. Every time you turn around, the other person is right there.
I also learned — not surprisingly — that sleep was going to be a problem. The rear seats of the van folded completely flat to make a bed, but when I woke at 5 AM, my back in total spasm, I could see straight away that it wasn’t for me. Years of manual labor have given me a spine of extraordinary finickiness, like that princess in the story who could feel a pea through seven mattresses.
Clearly, another solution was needed.
Tired and sore, we headed into Ljubljana, exploring its castle, its bridges, its market, where they sell bear meat in cans. It’s a charming town, made even better by the fact that unlike Vienna, unlike Zürich where we would end our trip, unlike Lake Bled and Hallstatt where we would stop along the way, it’s not overrun with tourists.
And as we journeyed on, through Slovenia to Austria to Germany, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland, I saw one major advantage of traveling this way.
You see places you never would otherwise. The places where trains are infrequent or never go at all. The places you’ve never heard of where you end up stopping for gas or a meal and never hear a word of English spoken.
The places where people aren’t sick of you before you’ve even arrived, where the prices aren’t marked up, the lines aren’t long, and no one’s trying to sell you a bracelet or a rose.
It all goes with you
One horrible month in my former life, I drove from Edmonton to Vancouver and back three times. It’s a little over 1100 km between those two towns. And along the way, besides towering mountains and empty roads, there’s almost nothing. You can stop for gas and a toilet break in Kamloops, and marvel at the beauty of Mount Robson as you fly past at high speed. That’s about it.
Our very first European road trip covered a similar distance but encompassed five different countries, several gorgeous towns, thousands of years of history, and a sometimes confusing mixture of languages and cultures.
And if I get the opportunity to do all that for €1 again, you better believe I’m taking it.
