Day 44 - Vaduz Liechtinstein

Photo 1: Werdenberg Schloss

2: Vaduz Castle

3: Werdenberg

4: Werdenberg

5: Liechtinstein border 

Poor Finn can't get a break. He has conjunctivitis, his laptop has died and seems to have some allergy. Out of the three, his only concern is his laptop which he insists carrying half way around the world to bring back home despite its total value being $0.50 and we're talking Aussie dollars here. Talking about Aussie dollars. The kids went to buy something and accidentally gave an Australian coin. The remark was "we don't take funny money here". I've never heard of Australian currency being referred to in this way but it is obviously considered Monopoly money here.

So despite Finn's woos he and the rest of us were up early to do the two hour drive to Liechtenstein. This country is about 25 kilometers long and 6 kilometers wide and has a population of just over 36,000 people. A lot of the journey was in tunnels. The 174 klm trip has 27 tunnels (you can see we were getting bored so started counting) carved through the Austrian Alps with some as long as 15 klms.

We hit the Liechtenstein border and was told to pull over to a parking area. We took our passports to the border office and we noticed people having papers stamped. The border officer spoke little English saying, "What you want?" I explained that we were told to park and come here and we didn't know what to do next. He told as to go. As Liechtenstein is a tax free country I think people were having some documents stamped for tax exemption and the first officer thought we wanted the same.

We drove into Vaduz, the capital and walked through some wonderful streets to the Werdenberg Schloss (castle). I was a little confused as to where the Vaduz Castle was so the sat-nav helped us with this. The kids and I walked the steep hour an hour rise to reach the Vaduz Castle. It is not opened to the public as the Prince of Liechtenstein lives there so we only gorked at it from the outside. We were not that impressed with Liechtenstein but being only a two hour drive from Innsbruck we had to check it out. It would be one of those places I'm glad I've seen but would not be in a hurry to return too. 

This is our last day in Innsbruck as we will travel to Venice, Italy tomorrow.