August 10: When I traveled on vacation I usually hated “taking a day off” and doing nothing because the days were so valuable. With only 2 or 3 weeks to see what I wanted to see, the thought of standing still for even a day was upsetting. One luxury of having 2 months here is that I can take a day off and not feel that I’m “wasting time” .
Today is such a day; it’s a day to remain in place and do no travelling. I’ve been here for 4 days now, and that’s a bit unusual. Typically I will move every day or so, but what I realized about this particular place is that could use it as a base for exploring southern Austria without actually moving to a new hotel every day. So for the last couple of days I’ve been running passes near here and then returning for the night. It helps that it’s a family-operated hotel with a good restaurant in a pretty village called Kappl. I spotted it by chance and it has been a happy accident of the trip – a discovery that I will remember for a very long time.
I happened upon Kappl as I was descending the Silvretta Hocchalpenstrasse in the very southwest corner of Austria. Like some other roads in the Alps, there’s a fee (12 Euro for motorcycles). Construction was started in 1938 to serve a hydro complex at the top of the pass, and there are 35 hairpins in its’ 22 km length. 
The next day I did a loop west of the hotel through the Flexenpass, the Arlbergpass and the Hochtannbergpass and yesterday I added a couple more to the east: Hahntennjoch, and Fernpass. In total, the distance I covered was probably less than 400 km over the two days, but I was on the road for at least 4 hours each day before coming home to the Posthotel. So I was quite happy to take a “day off” today to get in a run up the mountain and back, do a little laundry, and wander around town a bit.
The wonderful thing about this has been that I have been travelling for each of the last 3 days without actually moving. No packing and unpacking, no searching for a place to stay, no stress that I’m wasting time by “not moving”.