Noah has taken to the habit of looking around for money on the ground during our rest and navigation breaks. Today’s haul: 12 cents
Staying a the Schloss Leopoldskron produced a restful night. It is located a little outside of Saltzburg (still walking distance) near this picturesque lake, so there was no city noise or other things to disturb our slumber.
First up was breakfast at the palace in what looked like the main ballroom or dinning hall. It had to be the most impressive place I have eaten breakfast at. The hall was decorated similar to all the others palaces we had seen, including paintings on the walls and ceiling, and all the ornamentation and details on the walks and woodwork. Oh, and I shouldn’t forget the wonderful view we could see out the window of the Alps across the beautiful lake. The breakfast was good, mixing some American favorites with more traditional Austrian fair. Noah even had some chocolate yogurt and liked it.
After breakfast, it was time to pack up and check out of our hotel. A quick taxi ride across the city landed us back at the train station. We stopped off here to leave our bags and continue the tour of the city until the evening train.
The train lockers were not to difficult to figure out, once we found them. Fortunately, they had some big lockers, which allowed us to get all of our bags into two of them.
A short walk from the train station landed us in a little park, where we enjoyed the shade, plotted our plans for the day, and let the kids run around a little. It wasn’t minutes after we arrived until the kids had joined some local kids climbing in one of the park trees.
Just over a little hill in the park was the start of the beautiful Mirabell gardens surounding the Mirabell Palace. The steps leading down to the garden, we believe, is the location of the “do-re-me” song from Song of Music. Taking our time, we strolled through several of the gardens, enjoying the beautiful flowers and the scenes of the Festung Hohensalzburg and prominent hills framing the view from the gardens.
At one end of the garden we found a free WIFI spot, which allowed us to get online and take care of some travel plans and look up a few more things. Everyone took a break and enjoyed the shade on a hot day. More pictures and fun. We may have stayed a little to long, however, as a afternoon shower rolled in requiring us to hide out under a tree for a little while. It was a refreshing rain and not something the Oregonians in us were afraid to make a quick dash through to get to our next activity.
The high-light of the day’s activities was a performance of “The Magic Flute” at the Marionette theatre of Saltzburg. As we entered the building, I was pretty impress, it was a first class setup, similar to any other theatre or opera house you may go to. Inside was a small café where we got some refreshments before the show started.
The performance of “The Magic Flute” was great. The marionettes were pretty impressive, and the amount of expression the players were able to portray with them was quite amazing. A few times during the performance, I forgot these were not real actors. I will admit that I wasn’t sure what to expect, but enjoyed the performance and was pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed it as much as I did.
I believe everyone enjoyed it, including the kids. Fortunately, they had shorted the opera down to about one hour in length, which is about the maximum length our kids will stay still, so that worked out well. The Magic Flute has some pretty fanciful scenes, which were well done by the theatre, holding Noah’s and Katy’s attention. The adaptation also had some kid entertaining scenes with funny interactions between the marionettes. Noah even took the time to explain to me how they created the “fire” and “ice” realms the main had to conquer near the end, which told me he was definitely paying attention.
The next order of business was to eat a big “Linner” to hold us over to the next morning when we arrive in Florence. Our target was the world-famous Hotel Saucher and the Café Saucher.
Since this was our last chance for an Austrian meal, most of us order some traditional Austrian food from the menu. The food was good, but not quite as good as I would have expected. It also seemed that our server was very busy or ignoring us some of the time, which degraded the experience some. We all saved some room, however, for desert, including a few slices of the Saucher Torte. It was quite good by most accounts. Most of us thought the “fruit” icing in the middle was just ok. The non-sweetened whip cream it was served with, however, was a nice complement to the cake. After another round of “find the waiter”, we were off again.
We had some time before the train left, so the group decided a leisurely stroll back to the train station that walks past a few more land marks was in order.
We found the house where Mozart was raised for most of his kid and adolescent years. Becca decided to go in and take the tour of the house. Noah and I took the time to walk around the little park, chase some pigeons, and tour around a few more blocks of the city.
Time to head back to the train station to catch our evening train to Munich, the Railjet 66 from Saltzburg to Munich. Unfortuantely, the train was running about 10 minutes behind schedule, which meant we would only have 30 minutes in Munich to change trains, if the train held schedule. Fortunately the train did hold schedule and it was a quick and comfortable trip.
The change over to the night train in Munich went very smoothly. The crew is getting quite accustom to moving through a train station, dodging other people, finding the right train and car, and lugging the baggage on-board. There was a brief stop at a pizza stand in the train station to get Noah a second dinner for the train.
On the train we arranged ourselves into the sleeper cars. Noah was VERY excited because he go to travel on another sleeper car and he was on the top bunk. Everyone settled in quickly and was all cheery to be having another rolling slumber party. We also had a great steward on this train, who spoke great English and was very friendly.
Now that we were 7, we reserved 1 whole 6 person sleeper car (3 bunks high on each side of the cabin), and one single bed in a near-by 6 person sleeper. Of course, being the scariest of the crew, and least likely to be messed with, I was the one bed in the other cabin with strangers. Of course this wasn’t a big deal for me.
The cabin did have a interesting mix of people in it. There was myself, and older German guy (bunk above me), and 2 ~20 year old Japanese girls who I think were afraid to come down from the top bunks. During the middle of the night, we stopped at Innsbruck and picked up a 20’s German couple with big backpacks.
After hanging out with the car-of-6-slumber-party for a while, everyone tucked themselves in and I retired to my bed and crashed. I managed to catch some sleep even through I seemed to wake up at most stops and when the Innsbruck couple joined.
And on to Florence…
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