Grand Tour, Day 26: Austria

When I woke up, I called the Salzburg tourist office to see if they could offer suggestions for a day trip outside the city, mostly because we'd been doing city touring for a few days, and I thought it would be a nice break to get into the Alps. I ended  up being transferred multiple times. Nobody at the tourist office wanted to talk about day trips out of Salzburg, so we decided to head to the train station to see if the tourist office there would be more helpful.

The kids got up at 9. The hotel manager told me it could take a long time for a taxi for 5 to arrive, but after she called, the taxi showed up quickly. By 9:45, we were loaded up.

According to the hotel's website, Mozart and his sister once spent the night here. Above: Emilio and his sister await a taxi.

At the train station, the tourist office employees wouldn't talk about train schedules, and the ticket office employees wouldn't recommend destinations.  After walking back and forth between each office, I got everyone to agree that we had time to take a train to Zell am See and take another back before the night train to Rome was scheduled to leave the station.

The train to Zell am See left Salzburg at 11. We were on it.

If we had traveled this route at night, we would have missed  dramatic Alps, chalets on steep mountainsides, snowy peaks, and the roiling, milky jade river running beside the track.

We arrived in Zell am See at 1, and after we got off the train, we realized that Pabi left his fleece aboard.

We walked to the tourist office, where we got directions to a ski lift that would take us to a mountaintop hike. The chair lift was not for anyone who is afraid of heights, we were told. Also, the cloudy sky would inhibit the views. But it might clear up later.

We took our chances.

A public bus delivered us to the foot of the Schmittenhöhe, the "mother mountain" of Zell am See.  There we learned that round trip lift passes cost $110 for the five of us, but we were in too deep now to back out.

There were two lifts. The enclosed lift went to the higher peak, but the saleswoman assured us that the path between the two peaks was not steep (Austria "steep," and Oklahoma "steep" are two very different things, though).

We chose  the chair lift to Sonnkogel (the "Sonnenalmbahm" above) the lower of the two peaks, because we wanted to make sure we got a chance to ride in the open air chair lifts (the "Sonnkogelbahn").

Our journey began with an enclosed ride into the clouds.

Halfway up the mountain, we got off the enclosed lift and headed for the open chair lifts. Along the way, Nina enjoyed a "Hills are alive . . ." meadow run.

We were mostly alone on the mountain.

Emilio and Pablo rode with me; Nina rode with Mari.

At the top of the mountain, there was a mini-zipline and a slide that the kids played on.

The map at the chair lift landing was confusing, but the chairlift operator pointed us in the direction of the Schmittenhöhe. We then headed out on a gravel path above.

I got winded climbing this slope, though it was not (Austria) steep.

The kids? Not so much.

We saw pink and purple wildflowers all along the path.

At times, a window would open in the clouds revealing distant mountains and valleys below.

At the top of a hill halfway to somewhere (we weren't sure that it was the Schmittenhöhe), we decided to turn around to save time, but mostly because we liked the chairlift experience (and we were tired).

Before we turned back, though, Emi and I climbed the Salersbachköpf (1934 meters), and he added a rock to the peak, making it just a little bit taller.

Pabi and I sang "My Favorite Things" on the walk back.

At the top of the hill near the chair lift landing, there was a wooden swing and a restaurant that featured buttermilk on its menu. We thought of Mom, of course.

On the way down, the clouds began to clear, and the valley seemed to be waking up from a nap.

Bananas are not native to the Austrian Alps, so I did a double take when I saw this from the chair lift. I decided it was modern art.

The sun turned on the color switch.

We enjoyed the chair lift ride so much that we went up and down again. You can see Zell am See in the distance in the photo of Nina above.

As a result of our second round trip up and down the mountain, we had to hustle to catch the bus we needed to make our train connection. We caught our bus, though, so we ended up having time to buy snacks at the grocery--rice cakes, water, dried cranberries, apfelstrudle, potato chips.

The train from Zell am See to Salzburg left at 5:15. Some in our company napped before our 6:51 arrival in Salzburg.

At the Salzburg train station, we got a map of the old city and took a bus to the Rathaus (old town hall).Our first stop was the house where Mozart was born on January 27, 1756.

I visited the interior of this house when I hitchiked in the snow from Vienna to Salzburg in the spring of 1988.


That's the steeple of St. Peter's Abbey behind Nina in the photo above. A Benedictine monastery was founded here in the year 696. That onion-bulb dome dates to 1756, while construction of the church itself began in 1130.


There are tombstones behind the grates on the right in the photo above of St. Peter's Church cemetery. The oldest tombstone here dates to 1288.



Mozart's sister Nannerl was buried in this cemetery in 1829.


St. Peter's Church cemetery looks like the cemetery where the Von Trapps hid after their winning performance at the musical festival Max organized.

Some internet killjoys say that this cemetery was merely an inspiration for the Hollywood set where the actual scene was filmed. That was not the story I was told by our tour guide when I visited Salzburg in 1982 on my first trip to Europe.


This giant sculpture by Stephen Balkenhol is titled "Sphaera." It was installed in Salzburg's Kapitelplatz in 2007. Balkenhol is the same artist who designed "Man with Outspread Arms," which we saw in Munich.



At the foot of the Sphaera is a giant chess board. The kids were tempted to play.


We rode the Festungsbahn--a diagonal funicular cable car--up the hill to visit the Hohensalzburg castle.


The Festungsbahn was first built in 1892 and has been modernized many times since then.


These panoramic windows were added in 2011.

Though the car can fit 55, we were the only 5 passengers on our ride. We climbed 30 stories in one minute.


The castle is one of the biggest medieval castles in Europe. Construction of the fortress began in 1077. Its ring walls and towers were built in 1462. The current external battlements were completed in the 17th century out of concern that the Ottoman Turks would attack the city (they almost conquered Vienna in 1683).

That's the Salzach river in the distance.


We climbed the stairs to castle's interior and had free run of the place. According to Rick Steve, this courtyard was "the main square of the castle residents, a community of a thousand--which could be self-sufficient when necessary. The square was ringed by the shops of craftsmen, blacksmiths, bakers, and so on."


During World War One, Italian prisoners-of-war were kept here.

We left the castle at 8:50, walked though the narrow avenues of the old town and up the Judengasse before catching a taxi back to the Hautbahnhof.

At the train station's grocery store, we loaded up on mixed-fruit juice, apple juice, water, cream cheese, sliced bread, and sushi (for Mari).

Our train arrived early at the platform, and we were delighted to learn that the sixth bunk on our cabin would be unoccupied.  We didn't believe it, though, until we'd pulled out of the station, and no drunken, bleeding Swedes stumbled down the aisle.

I gave the porter our breakfast orders in ugly German, and she helped us fix the privacy curtain on our window.

Some of us played cards after dinner.

Lights out after midnight.

Some of us soon learned that sleeping in a train is much more like camping in a tent than it is like sleeping in a hotel.