We left Venice pretty early and headed for Salzburg, we decided not to take the toll roads for the entire drive from Venice to Salzburg so we spent the first couple of hours travelling through the Italian countryside which was nice.
One of the first things you notice as you head out of Italy towards Austria is of course the huge mountains that are appearing in front of you, which reminds me of something that we've notice all throug this trip, they're very good at building bridges and tunnels in this part of the world, the roads are just as amazing as many of the other things you see, just because of the engineering that's required to build roads through the terrain here.
We had lunch on the road not far from the Austrian border, we've eaten at the roadside "fast food" places on quite a few of the days that we've been travelling, it's been a real eye opener to go from McDonalds or KFC to roadside diners that have panini's, stroganoff, pizza, pasta etc these seem to be all through Europe and are a much nicer way to break you're trip, you can even sit down and have wine or beer with your meal, which most of the locals seem to do.
After crossing the border we stopped for an afternoon coffee break, and the first thing we notice is that everything in Austria is spotless, this theme carries on for our entire stay in Austria, it's very clean and you always feel safe here.
We arrived in Salzburg during the afternoon and walked into town for a quick look around, we stumbled onto Mozarts house and some very nice architecture, once we'd been wandering around fo a couple of hours we found a reasonable looking Restaurant and sat down for some dinner. Carol had a pork leg and I had goulash, both were very nice, and went well with the local beer, we then shared an apple strudel for desert which was excellent(OK, so I ate most of it).
On our second day in Salzburg we headed for Hellbrunn palace, which is a palace built by an Arch bishop who liked the idea of playing practical jokes on his guests, so he setup a number of "trick" fountains designed to get his guests wet, either while eating at the table or while visiting various attractions that he had scattered around his garden. The tour was really good, and we only got a little bit wet (the tour guide seems to enjoy his job and likes to get everyone at least a little bit wet).
We then toured the Palace itself and the museum which is also on the grounds, it has a good historical view of Austrian cullture which was also good to see.
Once we finished up at Hellbrun (by now it was raining quite heavily so if you were on the fountain tour now you were getting wet and it had nothing to do with the fountains!) we headed back into the centre of Salzburg and hiked up to Hohensalzburg, which was the original city of Salzburg and the main fortress which was used when the city was under seige. We spent the rest of the day in here as there was an aweful lot to see, by the time we left here we were pretty much done for the day, so we headed back down into Salzburg (the castle is on the hill above the city), had a quiet beer and headed back to the hotel.
We needed to do some washing to keep us in clean clothes so we headed off to the laundromat and ran into a nice couple (Aussie lad and Kiwi lass) who had just arrived in Salzburg. Dane was a pilot from Hamilton Island and was keen on heading out to "Hangar 7" tomorrow morning, which I hadn't heard of as yet, it's a hangar with a collection of Dietrich Mateschitz's(the Red Bull guy) toys, such as panes F1 cars, motor bikes etc. This sounded like something I'd like to have a look at so we offered to pick them up in the morning and give them a lift out there (it's about 3k's out of Salzburg and they were travelling by train).
We enjoyed a couple of hours at the hangar(I'm sure this is as close as I'll ever get to an F1 car), dropped Dane and Bridgit back in town and headed for Prague.
We really liked Austria, very friendly people, very beautiful place.
Some pictures from around Salzburg
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