April 9-10, 2010, Brad and I decided to take an overnight trip to Salzburg, Austria. Since Friday was a training holiday for me, we woke up early and headed out. Salzburg is about a 3-1/2 hour drive from Stuttgart. We were lucky in that the drive was smooth, with very little traffic. Since Salzburg is at the foothills of the mountains, we enjoyed the scenic views along the route, especially when we started seeing mountains. It made both of us realize how much we missed them.
Arriving in Salzburg, we first went to our hotel. Since it was too early to check in, we just parked the car there and headed out into town. We stayed at the Hotel Belmondo, which was nice enough, in a typically European fashion, which means the room was big enough for a bed and that was it. We did purchase Salzburg Cards from the front desk, these cards are available in many cities in Europe. You buy this card for 24 hours, 48 hours or 72 hours that includes many museums, public transportation and more. We had done the same in Amsterdam so it seemed like a good idea. All the places we went except the Salt Mines were included, including the cable car ride up Unterberg. The card also gave us a discount at the Salt mines so it was well worth the cost.
After parking we headed out, walking along the Salzach River. It was a beautiful day in the 60's and sunny. We walked until we found a place to eat lunch, sitting outside and enjoying the weather - Brad had Salzburg Schnitzel (stuffed breaded meat) and I had the lunch special (fish). We then headed back out, crossing over the river and walking down the very scenic streets until we arrived at Mozart's birthplace. Brad and I both really liked walking around this apartment with the thick tile or wood floorboards and the stucco walls.
This picture shows the catacombs from the outside. While there were no bodies inside, it was interesting because it was a very old church inside a mountain. Also interesting though was the inside of St Peter's Abbey (built in the 1100's) with all the elaborate paintings.
And the graveyard behind the church and at the base of the cliff holding the catacombs.
After that we went up the rail car to the castle (Fortress Hohensalzburg) at the top of the city. There we went on a tour of the inside, which included awesome views from the rooftop. This was one of the strangest tours I've ever been on. The "tour guide" doesn't say anything, meerly shepherding the people through to keep the group together and under his control. They give you audio devices, with over a dozen languages available, that you hold up to your ear and listen to for the tour. It also results in everyone moving to the same things at once, so I listened ahead so I could see the key things in each room without following along like sheep. Besides the view, the most interesting part was the area where prisoners were held - lowered down into a 15 ft deep room with no windows or doors. The other thing that was neat was the organ - it was like a player piano or music box with a big round drum to play the notes instead of a organist. It only played one tune.
After walking around the musuems, Brad and I had some coffee, beer and a pretzel sitting at the castle top, enjoying the sunny day. Unfortunately, while sitting there - at 5:10 p.m. - I double checked the train schedule to discover that the signs posted at the train that it's open until 8:30p.m. didn't start until May - the train stopped running at 5:00!!! Too late to do anything else, we enjoyed our snack and then walked down.
The walk down was somewhat crazy! Instead of steps there was a steep gravel drive with a board walkway, with small boards nailed into it as steps. You can see it here. It reminded us of several of the ship brows we've walked on over time. Behind Brad in this picture you can see the tram tracks going into the building.
After we walked down we went through town again, checking out the sights and headed back to our hotel. Tired from our busy day we just got some pizza and pasta from the restaurant next to the hotel and crashed out for the night.
Our next stop on this trip was the Hallein Salt Mine. Because we were at the Unterbergbahn, the GPS directed us on back roads to get to the Salt mine. You can see that this road isn't wider than one car width. When we met a couple cars we had to pull completely off the road to allow them to pass.
Salzburg reached prosperity due to the salt mines located near it. While they still have a ton of unmined salt, other more economical ways of mining have replaced these mines. In the early 1900's they were turned into tourist attractions. So we geared up and headed in. They give you these "miner" outfits -- I think they made us all look like Prisoners of War! As part of the tour you take a railway in - straddling some benches on the tracks they shuttle you quickly into the mountains, hurtling down a pitch black tunnel for a mile. This set up would never work in the states because someone would stand up or lean too far off and get hurt and then sue the salt mine, but in Europe if you stand up or fall of it's your own stupid fault. Liability isn't the same over here. Then you get to slide down these wooden railings, you can get up some speed doing it. The railings used to be the way the miners would get into the mines, with notched logs as stairs to get out. There is also a boat ride you take across an underground lake, all accompanied with stops for the tour guide to tell you what was going on and to play some multilingual videos (they were in German with English and Italian subtitles). We ate lunch at the mine restaurant and then headed back to Stuttgart. Altogether a beautiful, scenic and lovely two days.
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