Day 56 in the Big Bad Ischl House….

(Sunday, 10 May 2020)

Since neither of us did anything of note on Sunday bar faff around with some problems with the website and I failed to take even a single photo, I thought it might be fun to do something a bit different in the way of an update.

One of the questions we get asked regularly by guests is ”how did you come to Austria – why Austria?” Sometimes we elaborate and tell an abridged version of the story and sometimes we just airily wave our arms in the direction of the view out of the window and say “because of this…!” But in truth, it really is a story that evolved over a number of years.

I remember as a child thinking that Austria and Switzerland were places that existed in fiction… Heidi… The Sound of Music… etc. As a teenager, they were the places that retired people on coach trips went on holiday. Later as an adult who’d discovered skiing, it was somewhere that people went skiing when they didn’t go to the French Alps. Honestly, I had no idea!! What a numpty…

This country is so beautiful and has such a great quality of life. Incidentally, Vienna has won the ‘City with the best quality of life’ award for the last 10 years in a row, which probably tells you everything you need to know!

If it hadn’t been for snowHeads (the ski forum to end all ski forums) and the resulting friendships I made as a result, I probably would never have made it to Austria on a ski holiday and then subsequently gone back there in summer to visit Haus Susanne – home of Ben & Ange and their wonderful family. Not only did I discover the awesome skiing here, but just how lovely it is in summer too. I owe them a lot… our whole lives here happened as a direct result of those two trips. Thank you guys

I’ve already mentioned how Mark and I met and then got together, skiing in France both times. The next ski trip we took, together with our dear friend Katherine, was to Haus Susanne in Radstadt at Christmas that same year. On Christmas Eve, we skied together at Zauchensee and once atop a mountain there, in the sunshine, surrounded by beautiful 360 degree views, Mark surprised me completely by climbing out of his skis and onto bended knee….

Off and on at various times, we’d talked about moving abroad at some point, initially to France and then later, deciding we rather liked Austria. Both of us spoke a little French, but neither of us, any German.

Mark had been head hunted and taken up a new job which was a big step up, both in responsibility and financially. With all these things, that equates directly to the time and stress involved. He switched from working at home with occasional meetings and a bit of travelling, to leaving home for London at 5.30 in the morning, not returning until gone 7pm on office days and travelling all over the world. At various points he would fly to various far flung places only to have a meeting, a night in a hotel and return again the next day, having to go straight back into the office the day after that with no break. We had agreed that taking this job would be a good thing and we had planned he should do it, we would both work hard, get some savings behind us and retire early. We had a 5 year plan.

A year and a bit into this plan, we went on a ski trip with snowHeads to Italy. On the drive home – somewhere just after we passed Innsbruck – Mark asked me if I’d seen our friend’s post on facebook. I hadn’t and he explained that apparently there was an Austrian B&B advertised for sale and Ange had shared the post. He said that he hadn’t been able to see any of the photos as the wifi in the hotel had been playing up. Some 22 hours later at home, I opened the post on facebook, looked at the photos of the B&B and promptly announced ‘We have to go back..!’

We duly did go back for a flying visit to see the place and the reality did not disappoint! We had opted for stupid o’clock flights from Heathrow on the Saturday morning to Munich, returning on a late flight on the Sunday. Having experienced every delay possible… passport control.. car hire queues… border queues (this was the height of the immigration crisis)… general traffic jams… we arrived some 5 hours late as it was almost dark, instead of the late morning arrival we had planned.

A quick look round the inside and a sociable evening with the previous owners, followed by a quick look around the outside in the morning and we took a walk through the village to explore a bit. We wandered up and sat on a convenient bench in the meadow overlooking Perneck and chatted things through. The conversation went something along the lines of “Well… are we going to do this then?”…. “Maybe we should, how often does an opportunity like this present itself?”… “Go on then… why not!”

For someone who is an avid researcher and review reader before buying pretty much anything, it appears that we had now decided to buy a house in a different country, leave everything we know behind, ditch our careers and start new ones, in an occupation that we know absolutely zero about, in a language that we speak not a single word… and all with substantially less research than I did for the washing machine that we bought a couple of years ago!

The 5 year plan was now a 5 month plan… and the rest, as they say, is history…

And whilst we’re on the subject of history, let’s just take a moment to appreciate the irony that we are actually living in the area that the Sound of Music was filmed…