Italy and Austria

Cindy and I enjoyed a wonderful month-long adventure in Italy and Austria during the winter of 2024.  In mid-January we flew Delta from Richmond, Virginia through Altanta to Munich.  From there we took a shuttle about 3 hours south out of Germany, across Austria, and into the northernmost tip of Italy to the charming town of Innichen.  We spent twenty days exploring that familiar territory.  We then used a trio of trains to take us north to Seefeld, Austria, a small winter-oriented town lying on a plateau high above Innsbruck.  After ten days there we sadly made our way home to Virginia, once again via Munich and Atlanta. It was a month-long adventure that left us with some wonderful memories in spite of the lackluster snowfall!

This was our fourth trip to the northernmost corner of Italy in the last four years. The charming town of Innichen, the spectacular Dolomites, and the unique province of Südtirol are already well-documented in other sections of this blog – you can read more about them here :

• Dobbiaco – January 2020
• Badia, Innichen, Ortisei, and Brixen – September/October 2022
• Innichen and Castelrotto – February 2023

We’ve also visited Seefeld, Austria before, although it was way back in 2012.  You can read more about this small Austrian town with the big Olympic history in our blog from that first trip :

• Seefeld – February 2012

Many folks ask us who we use as a travel agent.  The simple answer is that we don’t use one – Cindy does most of the planning for us.  She enjoys the process and has become quite proficient at putting together complex itineraries that run like the proverbial Swiss watch.  As with most of our recent trips, the original plan for this winter adventure started out looking quite different from the final itinerary that is documented here.

Once we decide on a general destination and timeframe Cindy begins her investigation of available flights, lodging reservations, train/bus schedules, etc.  She also looks at seasonal schedules for cable cars, opening and closing dates for hüttes, and even the weather to help put together the best possible itinerary given what we want to accomplish during the trip.

After the flights are booked and the lodging is reserved we dig deep into the amazing archive of videos available on YouTube to fill in the blanks in terms of specific hikes, restaurants, etc. that we want to enjoy in each area. The production quality for these videos ranges from surprisingly professional to hideously amateur, often biased to the latter, but nevertheless we still find most of them helpful in one way or another.  Sometimes they show us places that we’ve never heard of that we definitely want to visit and sometimes they show us places that we initially thought would be worthwhile but the reality is something else altogether.  The language can also be a challenge, but YouTube often has automatically generated English captions available – those tend to help out quite a bit given that our German, Italian, and French are rudimentary at best.

A popular saying in certain circles is that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, and that certainly holds true for traveling abroad.  We’ve learned to roll with the punches and be flexible when unexpected issues arise with transport, lodging, activities, weather, and even our health.  All but the most serious problems are soon forgotten in the context of the greater adventure!