The Hills are Alive

 We headed into Salzburg from Vienna. Got to the train station early and had to wait until 20 minutes before departure to have the platform number. Dan is all in favor in getting on the train early. Our bags seem to be heavier and heavier and we have literally bought nothing.   Already planning on sending stuff home but I am not sure since we still have the alps to do and Switzerland. So far especially since Berlin it has been warm.  Dan has taken to wearing shorts and plans to just have 1 long sleeve shirt just in case

We arrived in Salzburg to a drizzle that quickly cleared and we have had sunny warm weather since that time. Essentially we had another 1 hour of rain since we arrived

Our Salzburg days will be short. We spent one day doing a tour of the Salt Mines outside of Salzburg (now we know why it’s called Salzzzburg). Salt was mined and sent down to the Mediterranean on boats. They are still mining but far more sophisticated.   The second half of the day was a Sound of Music tour.  A little hokey but they took us to the Lake District about 20 miles from downtown Salzburg. This area is beautiful.   It was a full day. We did meet some interesting people on the tour.  One was a girl about early30’s who works for the government passport office as a project manager of new passport processing software, there were a couple of nurse practitioners from Sacramento and the last was a 22 year old who just graduated from Missouri Technical school who won the US contest sponsored by Red Bull in Paper Airplane flying.  He came in second for longest distance flight at 200 feet. Unfortunately lost in the finals due to a foot fault.   Fun to talk with him. Red Bull. Brought in people from all over the globe for this contest. Apparently (I wasn’t aware) Red Bull from founded in Salzburg and has headquarters there. 

So back to the Salt Mine tour. It was a little like an amusement park ride. We got to ride on a mine train sitting astride through a dark twisted tunnel a couple of times the 2 long wooden slides then a boat ride across a lake and finally a funicular ride.   We did get to wear heavy jump suits to go into the mine and although I dressed for 52 degrees it wasn’t really cold. Unfortunately our little group of 9 was piggybacked with a high school group. As we were all English speaking we were given audio boxes to use. 

The second half of the day was spent viewing Sound of music sights and discussions of what was real in the movie and what had to be adapted for Hollywood. A pleasant afternoon but we did enjoy the lakes part of Austria   This was where the kids falling out of the boat was shot. Room service for dinner and a bottle of wine.  Tomorrow we will explore Old Salzburg and then head to Munich.