Saturday 28th May 2022

Today we went into Lienz to do a supermarket shop. There's a better view from this branch of Lidl than we get when we go to our local one in Newton Abbot!

From Lienz we headed north into the National Park surrounding Austria's highest peak the Grossglockner. We stopped to look at this fine waterfall.

We soon arrived at the village of Hieligenblut, this translates to Holy Blood. Here's the church.

There is some old painting on the outside wall of the church.

Inside there is this ornate high alter.

The bottom right panel depicts the ascension of christ to heaven as two bare feet disappearing upwards into a cloud!

Things just as bizarre and ridiculous lurk just to the left of the high alter. According to legend a vial of christ's blood was brought to the area from the middle east by St Briccius who was then killed in an avalanche! His rescuers were unable to save St Brick but did manage to recover the vial of blood which is now housed in the tall silver affair seen here. Hence the name of the village. Anyone who believes any  such nonsense frankly need their head tested!

Hieligenblut is a bit of a tourist trap. 

As followers of this blog, if there are any, will know we avoid campsites like the plague. However, as residents of one, we know National Parks are almost without exception extremely unfriendly territory for campervanners. We therefore reluctantly checked in at the campsite at Hieligenblut. The van on the right of the picture is British registered!

We perched our van elegantly on the edge of a steep drop.

We took a walk along the nearby river - another Danube tributary.

While we were here we though we might as well go the whole hog so we turned up at the campsite restaurant for an evening meal! We had some local beer.

We had some schnitzel.

Back at the van the evening ended on a really low note. When I tried to put our laptop on charge the charger died! I had left the mains charger in Widecombe which we could have used in the van via an inverter which we have with us which transforms 12 volts into 230 volts. I decided not to do anymore blogging until such time as we could put the laptop on charge.

Today we travelled 29 miles (47 kilometres). We are at: N47.0373 E12.8391

Hieligenblut   No street view available