Route for Day 3:
This was probably the day my girlfriend was most excited for. About 20 minutes east of Innsbruck is Swarovski Kristallwelten, or “Crystal World”. Her one and only ask on the trip was that we could go here and I was happy to oblige in exchange for her coming along on all these awesome non-direct driving routes between stops.
The A12 goes directly from Innsbruck to Kristallwelten but I missed the onramp and ended up taking a meandering country road that paralleled the autobahn and was absolutely AWESOME! By now, I was starting to get pretty comfortable with the car and the clutch engagement point, so the gentle curves, beautiful scenery, and lack of other cars on the road had me arriving at Kristallwelten with a big smile on my face.
I don’t have much to say about Kristallwelten except that there is plenty of parking for the car enthusiast to be able to park far away from everyone else.
Once again, it was almost empty when we arrived around 8:30am and by 10:30 when we were leaving it was starting to get pretty crowded. Note that you can ask for discount tickets at the Welt, it ends up getting you the group rate which is $2 cheaper than the general admission.
The next stop for this day was at Familienberg Maiskogel. Continuing the theme for the morning, the road from Wattens to Familienberg Maiskogel was incredible. In particular, this was the drive I learned just how fast the B58 engine pulls. Seriously, it was way too easy to pass people (legally) in 3rd gear, just amazing.
The toboggan itself was pretty fun. I wanted to go a second time but the girlfriend was getting tired at this point and we still had quite a ways to Salzburg.
The route back to the autobahn was completely stopped due to an ill-placed roundabout that was causing a several-mile backup, so I just adopted a “take any road that goes east and we’ll eventually get around it” mentality and took off. A couple of farm roads later and we were on our way to Salzburg.
About 30 minutes outside of Salzburg the navigation system decided it didn’t want to help us get around Europe anymore and completely reset, requiring an activation code to get it running again. I had read about this before on other ED trip reports and even asked the delivery specialist at the Welt about the code in case we ran into this issue. But he was adamant that this no longer happened and we wouldn’t need it. He also told us we should never ever ever remove the USB stick with the European maps from the center console but my girlfriend insisted we had no other option at this point. Sure enough, after turning the car off, removing and re-entering the USB, and restarting the car, the maps came up just fine.