Day 9: Travel to Salzburg

Sunday

We rose early to leave Gimmewald for, well, who knows? We had planned to stop in Hall near Innsbruck, Austria for the night, but then we thought, why not go all the way to Salzburg and get the traveling over? We put on our backpacks, bought our lift and bus tickets to Lauterbrunnen, took a walk down main street to an overlook to enjoy one last view, and then headed back to the lift. We made our final journey down the Lauterbrunnen valley and boarded a train for Austria.

To be honest, my memory is a blur concerning this day. I know we stopped somewhere to change trains once or twice (and to buy coffee!) but it was a very long day.

At one of the train stations we stopped for dinner at an outdoor café, where I had spaetzle. I can’t remember which city this was. Everyone was smoking, but that’s half of Europe. We made some phone calls and procured a “zimmer” outside of Salzburg on Moostrasse. A zimmer is basically a room in someone’s house, although this place was detached and had several rooms and a breakfast room.

And before continuing, I must say that making phone calls in Europe using a calling card is NOT as easy as the guidebooks say. Either that or I'm retarded. Dial this prefix but only if you're here, and dial an extra digit if you're here, and don't forget this area code, but only if you're over there. Is that a dial tone? A busy signal? Did I dial the number incorrectly? What does it all mean?! Frustrating.

We arrived at the Salzburg train station after dark, hailed a cab, and tried to give the cabbie directions to Frau Balwein’s house using his broken English and my broken German. It must’ve worked. We arrived in the rain around 10:30. Frau Balwein took us up to our room and it was great. The best we’d seen so far and the cheapest. Strangely, the place had somewhat of a Santa Fe style to it. In addition, she had breakfast for us every morning, included in the fee.



This is one of the very few photos I took this day. A castle in Austria perched high up the side of a mountain. I took this from the train.






Some serious language barriers over there. It took about 30 seconds for me to pronounce that first word.






I don't know what this means, but suddenly I want to bank here.