Salzburg - 19 October

19 October

Today we unleashed our inner musical theater geek with a Sound of Music Tour to Salzburg.

A 2 hour bus ride to get to Salzburg, but it takes to pain out of changing buses because they just drop us to the new boat at the end ofnour Tour, so apart from the packing we aren't really affected.

A drive through the countryside is always interesting in other countries. There are a lot of houses with solar panels on the roof and some fields with solar panels. Austria is phasing out generating electricity using non renewable sources, which explains the huges numbers of wind farms we have seen.

Although we were driving towards the Alps we couldn't really see them, everything was shrouded in fog all morning. It is a little warmer today so the snow must have gone.

Most of the area were eravelled through was where the vegetables are grown, but the odd farm that had cattle had no fences, just temporary electric fencing and only about 20 cows for a huge amount of land. Very different to our farms.

We made a small stop in Oberhang, which is where the church they used for the wedding scene for Sound of Music is.

Another cute little town, with a massive privately owned lake. Apparently it is for sale....if you have a cool €18M.

We had a coffee at the cutest little coffee house, with baroque mirrors and chandeliers everywhere.

Then another half hour to Salburg. We did the Old Town on foot with our guide, who is a Salzburg local so he showed us some of the good spots and cheaper ways to do things. The first thing that strikes you is the fortress on the hill which dominate the skyline along with a huge number of church steeples. It is nicknamed church city because there are so many. After seeing a few more filing spots from the movie we had some free time to wander. It has a much smaller more compact feel tonic than vienna, and the buildings were all designed by Italian architects so looks quite different as well, some parts have a much more Italian feel. We saw the house Mozart was born in, wander the cutest shopping area, tried some apple strudel at the place our guide recommended and tried some local beer. 

The bus ride back to the boat was a different route as we are heading straight to Regensburg, so crossed the border into Germany quite early in the trip. The first thing we saw on crossing the border was the most massive castle I have ever seen. Burghausen Castle is apparently one of the biggest in the world, it would be a few kilometers long. The mad king was renowned for bankrupting the country building extravagant castles, and this particular one is where they filmed Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.