The two hours become a fence rather than a drive when you reserve a fourteen night base in the Salzkammergut

The two hours change job

In the house shape, two hours is a number you spend once. You land, you drive, you unpack, and after that the figure has done its work. This trip takes the same number and puts it round the outside. Eight nights become fourteen; in exchange, nothing goes on the list that sits more than two hours of driving from the door of the base, and that holds for all fourteen of them. The drive in is the short part: about an hour, some sixty kilometres of federal road from the airport at Salzburg, up over a low pass and down into the lakes. So the fence encloses more ground than a map suggests, because two hours here is not two hours of motorway. It is lake road with a rock wall on one side, a village you cross at walking pace, and then a climb. What is gone, plainly: the eleven hour day that gets you to a city on the far side of the country and back. What replaces it: six more nights, and a fortnight in which you never repack, never hunt for a new supermarket, and never lose a morning to a transfer.

One town, one hour in from the airport

The base is a spa town of about fourteen thousand people at 468 metres, standing where a small river runs into a larger one in a bowl of wooded hills. People have been coming here to sit still since the salt water baths made the place in the nineteenth century and the imperial family took a summer villa above the park, and the town still has that shape: a long riverside promenade, plastered facades in cream and ochre, a bandstand, a pastry shop with marble tables, a thermal bath open all year. Over a fortnight what matters is that the ordinary things are ordinary. Two supermarkets, a baker who has sold out by ten, a launderette, a chemist, a hospital, a station on a slow single track line. You unpack once into an apartment with a kitchen and a drying rack, which is not a sentimental detail in a valley that rains. The car stands outside for fourteen days, and on the two or three days you decide not to touch it, the town is walkable end to end in twenty five minutes.

What is inside the circle

Inside an hour: a lake village under a limestone wall twenty kilometres south, with salt workings above it that have been dug for something like seven thousand years and a funicular to reach them; a second spa town half an hour east over a pass at 993 metres, with two more lakes behind it and a road that simply stops at the water; the deepest lake in the country, 191 metres, thirty five minutes north, with a castle on an island and workshops that still throw and paint pottery; a rack railway that leaves a lakeside village at 540 metres and arrives at 1,732, five and a half kilometres of track at gradients up to a quarter. Inside two hours: a cable car onto a limestone plateau at just over 2,000 metres, ice caves at about 1,450, a green lake at 933 metres with a wall of rock standing behind it, the city an hour out with its churches and its Saturday crowds, and a gorge at the far edge of the fence. Fourteen days does not fill that. It repeats it. You will drive the same twenty kilometres of lake road nine or ten times, and by the second week you will know which of the lay bys has the view and which has the bins.

Rain, cloud base and the maintenance weeks

Shoulder season here means two separate things. The first is water. This is one of the wetter corners of the eastern Alps, somewhere near 1,600 millimetres a year, and in late May you should expect rain in some part of roughly half the days. It seldom rains all day. It rains for three hours, lifts, and leaves the cloud base sitting at 1,200 metres, which is under most of the things you drove up to look at. October is drier and colder, with fog on the lakes in the morning that goes by eleven, and snow on the high plateau any time after the first week. The second is opening dates. Several of the mountain railways and the lake boats stop for maintenance weeks in April and again in November, and one or two shut early if the snow beats the published date. Kitchens outside the main town keep two rest days a week at this time of year, and a few houses close for a fortnight between seasons. Across fourteen days that is an inconvenience. Across four it would be the holiday. That is a difference between the two lengths, not a recommendation. We send the dates that are actually in force, not a season.

Two people who like knowing where the coffee is

It suits two people who like knowing where the coffee is. If a good fortnight means going out and coming back, cooking three nights in five, reading through the afternoon when the rain comes on, and driving forty minutes to look at one thing properly instead of three things quickly, the fence will never feel like one. It does not suit anyone who wants the capital and the western valleys in the same trip. Both sit a long way outside the circle, and the shape and the price both depend on us not going to fetch them. It does not suit anyone who will not drive: buses reach the larger villages, but the timetable thins badly after four in the afternoon and a good half of this ground has no service at all. And it does not suit a traveller who goes restless in one place by day five. We would rather say so now than have you work it out on a wet Tuesday in the second week. If that is you, the eight night shape, or one of the shapes in the book that keeps moving, is the honest answer.

The price, and how this office is paid

From $3,290 for two people: fourteen nights in an apartment or a guest house room with its own kitchen, a hire car for the whole fortnight, collected where you land, and the arranging. The figure moves with the dates, with how far the house stands from the water, and with what the car firms are asking that month. It is confirmed when the booking is made, not when you read this page. Not in it: your own flights, which are yours and stay yours; fuel, which over a fortnight of this driving is not a rounding error; the motorway pass, if you take the fast road in; the local visitor tax of two or three euros a person a night, collected by the house; food; and the cable cars and mountain railways, which mount up quickly in a good week. Nothing is paid to us. You settle with the house and with the car desk directly, on their own terms, and some weeks later the supplier sends this office a share of a sum it had already charged you. That is our entire income. It is also why we hold no card number and could not take a deposit if you pressed one on us.

Awkward questions about this change

Will you book our flights, or the boat trips on the lakes?

No to both, and for the same reason. Anything that carries passengers, in the air or on the water, is sold to you by whoever runs it; we have an agreement with none of them and can issue nothing at all. Your seats are yours to hold and yours to change, and the lake sailings are bought at the pier on the day. What we will do is tell you which arrival times leave enough daylight for the drive in, and set the car collection to the hour you actually land rather than the hour printed on your ticket.

Two weeks in one small town. Will we run out of things?

You will run out of new things somewhere around day nine. Inside the circle there are perhaps twenty five outings worth a morning and maybe eight worth a whole day, and after that you are going back, in different weather and different light. Some people find the second visit to a place is the one they keep. Others are flattened by it. We cannot tell from here which you are. The fortnight is built for the first sort and does nothing at all for the second.

The eight night shape is from $2,340. Why is this one from $3,290?

Six more nights of the room, six more days of the car, and a base with a kitchen instead of a bedroom with a kettle. That is where the $950 goes. What you will not get from us is a line about which of the two is the sensible purchase. One fits inside a working week of leave and this one does not, which is a difference, and which way it cuts is a fact about your year rather than about the trips.

What happens if it rains for six days straight?

Then it rains for six days, and no one refunds anything on that account, ourselves included: weather is not a fault in a booking. What we send with the papers is the wet list. The salt workings, which are underground and the same temperature whatever the sky is doing. The two museums and the thermal bath in the base town. The pottery workshops on the deep lake. The one drive that is worth doing in cloud, when the water goes the colour of slate. We also say plainly that a week of low cloud will keep you off the plateau at 2,000 metres, and there is no arrangement that changes it.

Can we push one day past the two hours, just for one thing?

You can drive wherever you like. It is your car and we are not going to police it. What we will not do is plan the fortnight around it, because the moment an eleven hour day goes in, everything either side of it bends to make room for the recovery, and the shape stops being this shape. If the thing you want sits three hours out, tell us before we start. We would rather move the base, or put you in one of the shapes that travels, than draw a circle we both know you intend to leave.