Europe: part 4

Salzburg, Austria:

We woke up and got everything ready to leave from Munich.  We got on our train, and bid Munich farewell. We arrived in Salzburg pretty early, walked to our hostel and dropped our bags off. We went directly back to the train station and took a train to Hallein where we had to wait for an hour for the right bus to come and take us to the salt mines. It was a very pretty bus trip up to the mines.

We bought our tickets and went down into the mines. They had us dress in mining clothes, which were all white, and then we rode a little trolley that pulled benches you had to sit on by strattling it.

The mine was cold and dark.  The guide’s accent in English made it harder for me to understand than her German because it was so thick. While we were down there, we crossed country borders and headed back into Germany.

There were two really fun wooden slides that we went down while in the mines.  The slides were like two banisters side by side that you would straddle and slide down.  Those were by far the best things about the mines.  They each were pretty long slides!

Down in the mines, we were told that it was a constant 10 degrees in the mines because of the air flow and how far into the hills we were. After crossing back over into Austria, we went on a little boat ride into the mines where the guide explained this is how they extracted salt from the mines.  After our adventure in the mines, we went back to Salzburg on the train.  We decided that all the sights of Salzburg were pretty close so we decided to walk all of it because our feet were finally feeling a little better.  We walked all over the city and saw a ton of beautiful cathedrals.

We went up to the castle at the top of a hill in Salzburg, here is where Brian and I had a breakdown with tiredness and hurt feet because it was the end of the day, but we made it to the top!  It was completely worth it for the view alone.

After seeing the castle, we stopped at the base of it and had a charming meal in the biergarten.   I don’t know what we had, but it was really really good.  After eating, we made our way back to our hostel for the night.

One thing about hostels is that you have to share rooms if you want a cheap one.  We had a roommate while in Salzburg.  He was a touch odd when we met him in the middle of the day.  Luckily he stayed out until 1 am so we didn’t have to deal with him much that night.