Notes from Libby are in italics.
Here is the Salzburg picture gallery.
Salzburg is beautiful. The old town is full of old churches with onion shaped domes on their clock towers. A river, the Salzach, bounds the eastern edge of the old town, and steep cliffs surround the other three sides. Perched on top of the cliffs is one of the largest medieval castles in Europe. The day we arrived it was warm and sunny (unlike London, which was overcast and rainy the entire time we were there.) To take advantage of the weather, we ate breakfast at a little café near our hotel that had sidewalk seating. Libby reported that the coffee was some of the best she’s had anywhere. Later we joined the locals lying on the grass along the eastern bank of the river and took a nap. After all the busyness of London, this was heaven!
We did a little site seeing and poked our noses into a few shops until we could check into the hotel and get another hour or two of sleep. We decided to try one of the recommended restaurants in Rick’s guide book for dinner. It was a pub nestled into the shadow of the cliff below the fortress that overlooks Salzburg. There’s a narrow, winding road that snakes its way from the old town up to the castle, and between two levels of this road was a small line of stone buildings. Inside of one of these fairly nondescript buildings was an unremarkable green door that led to a small spiral staircase. At the top of the staircase was a modest pub, outfitted with traditional heavy dark wood, a bar, and a collection of small tables arranged in three small rooms separated by one or two steps. Off one of these rooms was a doorway that led to an open-air seating area. The back wall of the outdoor seating area was 15-foot tall stone retaining wall that backup against the upper part of the road to the castle. On the opposite side was the top of another 15 foot tall retaining wall that formed one side of the lower part of the road. Tucked into the cliffs like that meant there was a pretty good view of old Salzburg, and the numerous church bell towers dotting the town.
After taking a seat at one of the picnic tables outside, the waiter informed us that they were out of eggs, and could not make most of the items on the menu. However, if we wanted to wait about 30 minutes, the owner should be back from the market with more eggs. That was fine with us, since we didn’t really have any plans, and the weather (and the view) was stellar. We decided to order a beer and an appetizer and await the eggs.
The pub served a wheat beer from the oldest continually running brewery in Bavaria. It was run by a collection of Monks, who apparently had ample time on their hands to perfect their craft. Neither Libby nor I are really beer drinkers, but this was the best beer I’ve ever had, hands down. It was surprisingly smooth, with no bitterness, and a pleasant flavor. I’ve never had anything like it, and would have a hard time comparing it to anything I’ve had in the States. The food came a few minutes later, and then the bells started up for their nightly 7:00pm serenade of the town. Everything was perfect, except the eggs still hadn’t come, so we ordered another beer and another appetizer. We didn’t mind! When the eggs finally did come, we ordered a couple of traditional Germanic dishes (potato and cheese dumplings with cabbage, and a beef stew – I can’t remember the German names….) I think we spent about three hours at the pub, nursing our beers and enjoying the surroundings. In my book, it was one of the best meals we had the entire trip.
The next day we had breakfast in the “Afro café”, that glorified the 1970’s décor, fashion, and attitude. We sat down at one of the bright orange couches below a chandelier made from cheap plastic 1970’s children’s toys. The pillow at Libby’s elbow had a picture of a very self-assured black woman wearing a green bikini, platform heels, movie star sun glasses and a massive afro hair-do. Thought bubbles above her head made it clear what she was thinking about: money, nice cars, and diamonds. The slogan draped at her feet stated proudly “No Money, No Ladies.” Elsewhere on the pillow it said “It was getting so dynamic!” Everything in the café was afro themed, and bits of attitude were sprinkled everywhere. The napkins stated proudly “I love you like shoes.” It was awesome. The food was pretty good, too, but honestly we would have gone anyway – I wish we had such a quirky place like that in Arvada. We’d be there every weekend!
Later that morning we followed the self-guided tour of the old town in our guidebook, and saw several churches, a massive chess set in a large public square, and a huge public parking complex carved out of the insides of the cliffs that over look the town. We saw the house where Mozart was born, where he lived as a boy, and the church where he played his first concerts (including one that had no less than four pipe organs!)
In the afternoon we boarded a bus that took us around Salzburg and up into the lake district to the east, showing us all of the sites where the “Sound of Music” was filmed. The tour guide used to live in Boulder, Colorado, but moved to Austria because he married an Austrian girl. He was campy and hammed up the jokes, but we chuckled through the whole tour and really enjoyed it. I think I actually enjoyed the scenery on the way up to Mondsee, the town where they filmed the wedding scene, more than the rest of the trip. We had good weather again, and the little mountain towns flanked by quiet lakes on one side and the peaks of the Alps on the other were stunning.
After an abortive attempt to find a beer garden the tour guide told us about, we found ourselves climbing the back roads to the top of the cliffs above the old town looking for another of Rick’s recommended restaurants. The sun had gone down in the mean time, and walking along a narrow road through an unlit forest, we started wondering if we would be eating soon, or something would soon be eating us instead. After passing through the walls of an imposing (and very dark) medieval fortress, we discovered the restaurant we were looking for was closed (despite a sandwich board that clearly stated that they were open!) A side effect of the restaurant being closed is that we couldn’t access the elevator that would have deposited us at the base of the cliff (where there were surely more restaurants to be found – maybe some that were even open.) Left with no other option, we re-traced our steps along the darkened forest trail and down the hill towards civilization again. We wound up eating in a pretty unremarkable restaurant, but we were so hungry by then, everything tasted pretty good.
The next morning we boarded a train on our way to Venice. The train couldn’t take us all the way there. Instead, we were scheduled to arrive at the little town of Villach, in southern Austria after two and half hours winding through the Austrian Alps. From Villach, it was another two and half hours on a bus to Venice.
The train ride to Villach was stunning. The Alps are just as high as the Rocky Mountains (30 minutes from our house in Colorado), but they look to be steeper and more rugged. The train passed through more tunnels than I can count because there was simply no way to lay a track through the craggy peaks. Between the tunnels we could see the white-capped rock monoliths jutting into the sky on both sides of the train.
Here is the Villach picture gallery.
We arrived in Villach about 25 minutes late because the train was late getting to Salzburg. This meant we missed our bus to Venice, but we were able to change our reservation to the next bus that left an hour and half later. That gave us some unexpected time to wander around the town Villach. It was a really cute place. There was a small, gently flowing river through the center of the town (complete with a herd of swans), a couple of modest churches, and a central square that was host to a town market that had ramped up for Easter. We poked around the open-air market, wandered in and out of a few shops. It was an unexpected but very welcome break in the trip.
The bus from Villach to Venice continued the journey through the Alps on the Italian side of the border, with just as many tunnels as we had experienced on the train. It was a double-decker bus, and we were on the top, so we had an unobstructed view of the mountain peaks as we wound our way out of the Alps onto the plains just north of Venise. As nice as it was to be able to site-see from the top of the bus, I would give anything to take my Miata up onto those mountain roads and just drive for a week or two around Austria, Northern Italy and Switzerland. (Maybe another trip someday…)
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