Sounding off in Salzburg

Monday May 21.  Salzburg on, Salzburg off, Salzburg on again.  We originally had not intended to go to Salzburg but upon further research we found that our original target, Cesky Krumlov in the Czech Republic, is closed on Mondays.  Sorry folks, park's closed.  Yup, that's right, most of the town is closed on Mondays.  Arriving into Linz at 6:30 AM gave us the whole day to do some exploring so off to the home of Mozart.

 The previous night was spent on a train and as you might have guessed we did not get much sleep.  I intentionally had the fewest minutes of sleep as I tend to be a bit cautious in those situations.  In her early travel days Patti lost her money belt to a thief with passport and money in it when she fell asleep on a train in the middle of the day.  There are more details to that story, but it does not take much to get into a bad situation.  My strategy, if I slept at all, was to sleep so lightly that I would be more aware of what might be going on.  As well, I did not want to sleep through the Linz stop and end up in Vienna.  So I combined basically skipping dinner, eating fries only and a coke, and with having a semi full bladder.  Sounds pretty stupid, but I am able to run pretty well on next to no sleep and it seemed worth not finding ourselves with major issues. We made it and headed for Salzburg.  BTW, a 10 minute power nap on the way to Krumlov put me right back on track.

We were basically on a very limited highlight tour which I cooked up the day before with some interneting as we did not have a guidebook.  First up was the Hohensalzburg, the fortress.  This was very large and like others it grew over time and it was interesting to see the growth models on display.  They had a nice display of coins from the royal mint with a few that were particularly interesting.  There were some that were heavily clipped.  That is, they were literally shaved around the edges.  While counterfeiting by the citizens was illegal in their time as it is in ours, it was common for the mint (the king) to clip gold off of coins in circulation and mint new coins with this 'excess'.  Thus giving the king more money to spend and devaluing the existing coinage held by the citizenry.  Do things ever change?  At least this was a lot harder to do and anybody, including me 500 years later, could easily see what the king was up to.

Also interesting to appreciate was the power in the king, during a particular period when he also represented the church in Rome.   He who was the highest secular power was at the same time the highest spiritual power. 

We wanted to give the kids a little taste of one of their favorite movies, The Sound of Music.  The Von Huth Family Tourists posed in the same cemetery as the Von Trapps hid in during the movie.  My father in law would love the ornate iron headstones in this cemetery.

Of course, no day would be complete without a little browsing through shops.  The Von Huths shoppe the famed Getreidegasse without suffering any major damage.  I was there for all of the iron work signs over head, the kids were convinced they wanted some authentic Austrian clothing until they understood the price tag.

The pretzel shops about did us in.

We ate seven of them.  Five of which were as big as Tara's head.  And yes, that is a pretzel sandwich.  We also had a cheese pretzel, an apple strudel pretzel and a chocolate coated pretzel filled with jam.

Ok, time for bed.

Pics up in the Salzburg link in the upper right.