Salzburg, Austria Day 3

On our last day in Salzburg, we wanted to check out Hellbrunn Palace.  We had passed a pretty lake on our way to the hotel and I wanted to get pictures of it, so we took a long route to the palace, which was still only about 20 minutes.

Apparently this lake is popular with photographers because I encountered 2-3 of them while I was taking my pictures.  That God Mark is very patient with my picture taking and is more than happy to stop every 2 minutes for me to get out to take photos.

After my 20 mins of taking pictures, we headed to Hellbrunn Palace.  The palace was built in 1613-1619 and was only meant to be a day residence for the Archbishop that built it, so there are no bedrooms in the palace.

We decided to go on the trick fountain tour, which was fun for everyone.  Apparently the person that designed the palace was a bit of a jokester and he liked to play practical jokes on his guests.  The tour was a lot of fun, and it was fun seeing people on the tour get surprised by the water fountains.  There was an old lady that walked out of a grotto area that got sprayed by water coming out of statues and pots for plants, and other people got sprayed by water while they were inside a little building watching a water display.  Water shot out at their legs from under a bench.  But the end of the tour, everyone was hesitant to get near everything and the tour guide warned us to stay back on one of them because we had kiddos.  It was fun and I recommend the tour if you are ever at Hellbrunn Palace.

I love this photo.  I saw this web while we were on the tour and got COMPLETELY distracted trying to get a picture of it.  I like the way it turned out.

After the tour, we wandered around the palace grounds some, which completely cemented my idea that fall is THE best time to travel.  It was beautiful!

Do you recognize this?  It is what the “I am 16 going on 17” song was sung in in The Sound of Music.  In actuality, they made a bigger version of this one in Hollywood, but that’s what it was modeled after.  It is now on the palace grounds, along with a playground and a zoo.

Abbie really wanted to go to the park for a little bit so we let her play for a while.  The park was really nice, and it was a beautiful day.  She had fun.

We had a great time in Salzburg, even though we didn’t see half of what I would have liked to see.  As I usually say, I would love to go back someday, but I also wish we had spent more time there during our tour in Italy since it is so close!

Salzburg, Austria Day 2

My parents, Abbie, Ben and I headed to old town Salzburg on day 2.  Mark had to stay back to do master’s homework.  Boo.  The weather was pretty good – in the high 50’s/low 60’s and sunny. 
We headed to Mozartplatz first, and Abbie ran around the fountain that Maria splashed in at the beginning of the Sound of Music.

The splashing fountain is actually in Residenzplatz, right next to the Salzburg Dom church, which we also went in to.

We bought a water painting of Salzburg and then CD’s from a classical guitarist outside the church and then we went to St. Peter’s Cemetery, which they called the catacombs, but they aren’t like the underground catacombs we saw in Rome.  The catacombs here are the ones that the VonTrapp family hid behind at the end of the movie, although those ones were recreated in Hollywood.  They were made after the ones in this cemetery though.  It really was beautiful and every grave had it’s own little flower garden on it.  This is the oldest cemetery in Salzburg and is also known as “Petersfriedhof”.

Next we headed up to Hohensalzburg Castle, and the views were AMAZING!

This castle is one of the largest medieval fortresses in Europe and construction began on it in 1077.  It is built on top of the Festungsberg mountain and was used as military barracks in the 19th century.  It also held prisoners during WWI.

(Spires of St. Peter’s Abbey)

After we toured the castle and the marionette museum, we headed back down to the old town and grabbed some lunch.  I should have taken pictures of it but I didn’t, but it was some potato skillet dish that was topped with an egg.  It was really good and it warmed us all up.

As we were walking back to the car, we passed a guy doing a marionette act.  Abbie wasn’t too sure about the guy and she didn’t really want to get that close to him to give him the money.  My mom tried to convince her to put the money in his hand, but she wasn’t having any of it.  She gave everyone standing around watching her a good laugh though.  She didn’t mind posing with the Mozart ghost though.

We headed back to the hotel to try to take naps (unsuccesfully) and to pick up Mark who was done working on his paper.  We went to Mirabell gardens where they filmed the Do Re Mi song in the Sound of Music.

Maria and the kids danced around this fountain, bounced up and down these steps and ran through the garden archway.  It was hilarious because everywhere you looked there were people acting out various parts of the song.  Too funny!

When we were done touring Mirabell Gardens, we decided to find something to eat, which, as usual, took as a good 30+ mins to find a place.  We chose wrong this time however.  We ate at some nasty Chinese place that really wasn’t good at all.  Bummer.  But again, during our long walk around Salzburg trying to find a place to eat, I got a few good shots.



We went to Hellbrunn Palace for our last day in Salzburg.  More on that soon!

Salzburg, Austria Day 1

We headed to Salzburg, Austria with my parents October 19-21.  Mark and I had driven through Salzburg and stopped for quickly for a Christmas market back in 2010, but that was the extent of our visit to Salzburg, so we wanted to go explore a little more, and another short weekend wasn’t nearly enough time to see everything.

We stayed at this little hotel about 10 minutes outside of Salzburg.  It was in a beautiful location and I was excited to find it.  However, there is a restaurant/bar in the basement of the hotel, and on Saturday night, it was pretty darn loud, and VERY smoky.  Even from 2 stories above the bar, it smelled like someone was smoking in our room the entire night, which gave me a headache and was really annoying.  The place has lots of potential, because it is a cute place and the room are comfortable, but the noise and the smoke were really big turn offs.

The drive in the Salzburg was beautiful and I am convinced that fall is the prettiest time of year to travel almost anywhere, especially if you are some place the leaves change color.  I love fall in general, but Salzburg was extra beautiful with all the leaves changing colors.  I think I want to make fall my official season to travel in.  Forget summer when places are really busy and you have to fight heat and crowds.  I much prefer traveling in the fall.

So we really had no clue where we were going, but we headed in to Salzburg to find a place to eat after we’d settled in to our hotel.  One thing I will not miss at all, is trying to find a child friendly place to eat in Europe with 2 small kiddos.  I swear we spend a good 30+ minutes every meal trying to find a place to eat.  It’s not like in the States where pretty much most places are child friendly (have high chairs, changing tables, etc) and are fairly easy to find.  Most places in Europe aren’t very child friendly and the decent places are all spread out and pretty well hidden, unless you know where you’re going.  So I did a quick search on my iPhone for a decent restaurant, not even bothering to try to find “child friendly” and managed to find one that was only about a 15 min walk from where we were.  It ended up being a really nice place (and kind of expensive), but they had a high chair, so I was happy.  The trick to eating in Europe with kids is to GO EARLY!  At 5:30-6pm, try to be seated and then you beat the rush, and can snag a high chair since they usually only have 1-2.

The advantage to wandering around for quite a while trying to find a place to eat is that I got some good pictures in the meantime!

The good thing was that the restaurant turned out to be really good and we all enjoyed our meals.  (And they had a high chair!)  After dinner, we headed back to the hotel to try to get some sleep.  More on our 2nd day in Salzburg soon!

Because I took so many pictures on this trip, I am splitting this trip up into 3 posts for the 3 days we were there.