I had a nice chat with Andreas in the morning while waiting for Chris to get up, get ready, and inexplicably iron shirts while I was ready to get in the car for our day's excursion to Hallstatt. I suppose neither of us expected the salt mine to close at 2pm, but when taking a day trip that is an hour and a half away, you shouldn't leave at noon.
The drive was fantastic, however. The mountain roads were rather easy in this part of the country, and the GPS worked everywhere so there was no concern about getting lost. I had worried that signals in the Alps would be non-existent, but not enough to bring a map - there were plenty of places to stop and ask for directions if need be. Austria, and Europe in general, is densely populated, unlike the areas around the Rocky Mountains - my other point of reference - and I think the Austrian Alps are lower and more gentle than their counterparts further south. Perhaps that makes for better infrastructure. Or not - what do I know about mountains, having grown up in the flat cornfields of Ohio?
The GPS signal never left us, nor did the sun. We stopped somewhere for lunch as things became excessively beautiful. It was a bit chilly, so we chose to sit inside to eat yet more meat dishes, but the blue skies were so deep that I had forgotten about anything except happiness.
the restaurant
I had gotten it into my head to go to Hallstatt some years ago when I joined Instagram to look longingly at travel photos while suffering beneath the harsh fluorescent lights of the office. It seemed as if I saw the town every time I logged on. When we decided to go to Austria, I looked up its distance to Salzburg and was thrilled to discover it was a daytrip away. There was no doubt we would visit, and it was well worth the trip.
Despite all of the things that could have been unpleasant, those that normally could have driven me out of my mind - missing the salt mine tour, the hoards of rude Chinese tourists, the terrifying funicular, the suffocating one-laned tunnel that you have to go through to get there - it was probably my favorite place we visited. Just look at it:
While we had missed the salt mine tour, the funicular still took people 840 meters to the top of a mountain, and besides, the day was too beautiful to spend it inside a mountain, so up we went. It took several minutes and I hated every minute of it. It was like taking off in a plane, except at one point it was almost 90 degrees straight up. While Chris made his video, I was closing my eyes and clenching anything I could hang on to. Suddenly, Funiculi, Funicula got into my head, and it still hasn't left. (Did you know that song was written by an Italian composer as something of a joke to commemorate the opening of a funicular to the top of Mount Vesuvius? It's about this guy whose girlfriend has broken up with him, so he takes the funicular to the top of the mountain to lament his troubles. People started mistaking the song as some Neapolitan folk song - Richard Strauss and Rimsky-Korsokov both used it in compositions, thinking that. The actual funicular ended up being destroyed when Vesuvius erupted in the forties. The more you know...)
and I used to LOVE roller coasters
It was beyond worth it.
We took in the views and had a beer at the top.
Chris made the choice; I would have picked the same.
the mountain top bar
The funicular station
the "putting green"
We headed back down after maybe an hour to look around the town. We found the park that had looked like a putting green jutting out into the lake, a park that was relatively tourist free and rather peaceful.
the "putting green" from the ground
the funicular from afar
dork
different view of dork
the town from afar
panorama
After we visited the putting green park, we headed to the main part of town. The architecture was fantastic, but the town itself had been turned into a kind of alpine Disneyland and the streets were lined with tourists from China and America. It made for a rather odd experience. Had we more time, we may have sat down at an overpriced restaurant where the menus were in German, English, and Chinese. But daylight leaves sooner in the mountains, and we were supposed to meet our friends back in Oberndorf for dinner, so we took a leisurely stroll through the main street before heading back.
(I fought the low-hanging sun for some of these photos - I lost my sun cover some years ago and keep forgetting to get another one.)
I don't know, either
The emperor once visited here, the the guy who started WWI
This sign speaks volumes about the rudeness of the tourist hordes.
The town is as gorgeous as the views above it.
We grabbed some Hallstatt beer to take back to Andreas and Anni to have on our last night with them and set off for Oberndorf. But the drive took much longer than we had anticipated, as the winding roads made for a slower drive that the GPS lady didn't tell us about. LOL. It was such a beautiful part of the world - lakes and small alpine towns abounded. We could have spent all day - no, all week - stopping off in places with names like Wolfgangsee, St. Gilgen, and Furburg. We didn't stop, but by the time we arrived, it was well past the hour they would have eaten, so we went to Laufen to find food. The restaurant we found was fantastic, and I wish we could have had a better sense of time and taken them to dinner there. We had been looking for a sandwich or something and ended up eating a three course meal. I still feel bad for missing dinner (sorry Andreas and Anni), but at least we experienced this wonderful restaurant in a small German town we'd never heard of until we entered it.
At any rate, we returned after dinner and drank our Hallstatt beers and played a game similar to Uno with a fabulous deck of cards based on the characters from William Tell. In flat cornfield Ohio, we had played cards all the time, and even in Luxembourg, where I learned just how many different kinds of decks there were in Europe. In this deck, the queens were all men but they looked like queens of a different sort. The suits were hearts, acorns, bells, and leaves. That was a lot of fun, though Chris wouldn't hold his cards correctly so Andreas kept looking at them. That's why we each won three games before Chris won his first. (Not to mention he couldn't keep the suits straight, blaming color blindness, to which Andreas replied, "Are you also shape-blind?" LOL.)
We stayed up pretty late, but it was the last night with my friend. In the morning we chatted over coffee while Chris slept until we had to leave for Vienna. I hope we weren't too much of a burden on them. I certainly had a wonderful time and thank them for their hospitality. I hope, as we discussed briefly, we can meet up somewhere in a few years, perhaps in Croatia as part of my quest to visit every Mediterranean country, or to be more specific for Andreas's sake, every UN recognized Mediterranean country.
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