Adventures in Osterreich

Our first stop for free weekend trip number two was the town of Salzburg, Austria.  I have found the greatest place in the entire world to take an afternoon nap.  Seriously, the top, number one, best place ever is laying on the bank of the Salzach river in the middle of the town famous for the filming of the Sound of Music and being the home of Mozart.

The highest point in the historic district of Salzburg is a castle overlooking everything.

I didn't take the time to try on the leiderhosen, but they were surprisingly popular.

In Salzburg we met an older British man from Nottingham who told us, "If Hallstatt is not heaven, then I do not want to go." Luckily, Hallstatt was our next stop.

There are two ways to get from the Hallstatt train drop off.  Walking around the lake for 3km, or taking the ferry accross.

Poor little homely town...

We took the gondola up 1500 meters above Hallstatt, and as you can see, the summer up there means something a little different from summer in Louisiana.

The 5fingers overlook platform juts out from the mountain directly over a 400meter cliff.  

The trip to and from Austria presented a few memorable events as well.  On the way there, we had a 5 hour lay over in the Munich train station, and while I was sleeping on some newspaper two guys came up and started talking.  They slid a pillow over towards me, and said "You want pillow?  It's good pillow.  Just stole from pub.  I was a little wary of holding on to that thing, and it smelled pretty bad, but I did get a picture of the good pub pillow.

On the way back to Berlin we experience another memorable event, but the nature of this event prevents a picture of it.  During a 10 minute hectic layover our group size dropped from 6 to 7 people.  Everyone eventually got to Berlin, but Sunday morning confirmed our suspicion that if you are the slightest bit late for a German train, you are going to get left.