Täglich Wiederkehrendes Abenteuer

On our way to the big Oktoberfest party, we decided to hit Salzburg for a day. We left Linz about noon and got into Salzburg at about 1. We wound our way from the train station to the historical part of the city. Everyone loves the old churches in Europe, so that was our first stop. Some of them are quite impressive. Especially when a secondary alter is GIGANTIC.

Honestly, the main one isn’t much bigger. But still.

After the church, Mary Jo decided we should check out the fort. I guess Salzburg has this big fort that’s a pretty central point for the tourist business. It’s a pretty impressive sight.

Now, see how high that is up there? Well, they have a tram that can bring you up there. We checked the price, and it was something like 13 Euro per person for the tram and full access to the fort. We didn’t take the tram. We opted to take the stairs. Fortunately, the stairs turned into a road. The road was still a tough go. We were rather sweaty by the time we made it up to the fort.

Once you get in, you realize just how big the place is. This is the smaller of the two courtyards.

Yeah, it’s still pretty big. There are other sections of the fort you can’t even see in this picture. It’s BIG. At this point we were still pretty tired and sweaty, so we were questioning why we even bothered to make the climb. Well, we went through a small tunnel and were presented with this:

Questioning concluded. It’s a tough climb, but you get a great view. This is actually the suburbs part of the city, but who cares, it’s beautiful. If you look straight down, you get a view of a large field (we assume it’s a park). It’s funny though, because there’s an actual house right in the middle of it.

Going deeper into the fort, you find museums. The first is all about puppets. Like, puppets used in puppet theaters. There’s even a room where you can drop money into a little “prison” for the puppets. Mary Jo made a friend when she gave a little girl a coin to drop down.

Mary Jo said that she was sure the kid was going to run off with the coin. 😀

The second museum was actually the old bed chambers for the top brass. We noticed that things were a little small. Uniforms seemed too tiny, plates, etc. Mary Jo mentioned that people were smaller back then. They sure were.

We kept going through the museums. They had old uniforms, medals, and pottery from the early days of the fort. They also had old weapons. Guns from WWII, spears, etc. One stood out though. I give you the most amazing weapon ever. TOMAHAWK GUN!

We did some more looking around, then headed back down to town. The trip down was almost worse than the trip up. Some parts of the road were a little rocky. You kind of expected to slip and go *thwap thwap thwap* all the way down. We managed to get back to town safely. We decided to check out one more spot. There was a church nearby with a neat cemetery. We looked around a bit then went over to the chapel built into the mountain. We climbed our way up… and pretty much collapsed. We were simply dead at this point. Mary Jo’s face says it all.

The dang thing is a little nasty though. It starts out with nice normal steps, then quickly turns into this.

I tell ya. After that we were super wobbly on our feet, so we went to the hostel. We made it there and laid down. This was at 8PM. It was also the end of the day. Once we hit the bed, we didn’t get back up.

Stay tuned for part 2 – Salzburg and Trip to Munich.