"How do you solve a problem like...your hostel being on top of a mountain?"

We’re settled in for a nearly 6-hour train ride today, so I went ahead and unpacked the computer so we can spend some time catching up on typing our blogs (even if we can’t post them) and downloading pictures. We’re heading from Salzburg to Zurich and from there to Bern and from there to Interlaken. We reserved three nights in a guesthouse in Interlaken based on our recent success with guesthouse accommodations.
We had a gorgeous and sunny day in Salzburg yesterday. All the mountains were out and what a beautiful city in such a gorgeous setting! This is a place I want to come back to.

We started our day with the Sound of Music tour. It was a small tour company, only 8 people in a VW van instead of a huge tour bus and we really liked that. Our whole group was American except for a sweet Australian girl. Australian, not Austrian. The Austrian’s don’t like Sound of Music and seem to only grudgingly accept the tourism money it brings them :). The tour was okay, but we really didn’t see that much that was Sound of Music related. If I did it again, I’d do the bike tour because several locations are not accessible with the van. The tour was worth it just to get out into the countryside surrounding Salzburg though. They took us all the way out to the lake district in the mountains…the lakes were turquoise and the mountains were green and the villages were ridiculously picturesque. So beautiful. But being in the mountains is starting to make us homesick and while we’re excited for what we have yet to see, I think we’re both getting ready to head home. We’ve elected to head back to Berlin after Geneva rather than squeezing in another city, because it sounds really good to just hang out with John and Kristen for a couple of nights. We’re looking into getting a night train.

As I told you before, with the Euro-Cup being in town, we weren’t able to book two nights in the same place, so our backpacks went with us on the SOM tour in the morning and after the tour, we were dropped off in the city center and had to get the backpacks to our next night’s accommodations. Small problem. Our next night’s accommodations were on the TOP of Monchsberg. We had thought we could just take the funicular up to the fortress and walk along the top of the mountain, but the only way to take the funicular was to pay for another entrance ticket to the fortress, which we didn’t want to do. Our next option was to haul our packs to the other end of the old city, take a lift up to the Modern Art Museum and walk back along the mountain to the hostel. Well, as we walked to the lift, we passed the stairs that we’d taken the day before. We looked at each other and laughed, because when we’d taken those stairs yesterday, we’d both said “Man, I’m glad we don’t have to do this with our packs on!” And now we decided we’d rather just head up than walk all the way across town and back along the mountain. So we hauled our packs up that mountain…all 335 stairs up that mountain…not including the steeply sloping grades in between staircases. When we finally reached our hostel, we dropped our packs and gaped at the views of the city from our room!

When we’d recovered a bit, we headed back down the mountain via the stairs so we could count them, and then found a café with wireless and booked rooms for Interlaken and Geneva…that’s all the reservations we’re going to need for the rest of the trip! That’s a good feeling! They didn’t have any outlets at that café and my computer battery died literally the minute that we’d finalized our lodgings in Geneva!

We wandered for a bit in the Mirabell Palace Gardens, which was refreshing. They had an arbor covered in blooming jasmine and the whole park smelled lovely, the roses were in full bloom and the landscaping was unique (each park has had it’s own feel which has made it really fun to see one in each city.) The park is in the “new” city (ca. 1600’s instead of 1400’s) and as we walked across the bridge back to the old city, we came across European football fanaticism at its most glorious! :) The Swedish fans that have been painting the city streets yellow with their shirts for days had all come together into a huge, police-escorted sea of humanity making their way to the stadium for the game against Greece. They were singing and chanting and waving flags and stretched down the street as far as we could see in either direction. I’ve never seen anything like it. I think the Greek fans were even a little bit in awe. I saw several Greek fans jumping into the crowd to get their pictures taken with the Swedes. :) After watching in amazement for a while, we headed to a quiet café and watched Spain beat Russia and chatted a bit with some New Zealanders who’d come up for the football. Then we decided to brave the Fanzone to watch kick off of the Sweden/Greece game on the big screens. The Austrian equivalent of Ryan Seacrest was hosting the events.

We had fun watching the huge crowds for a bit, but then we’d had enough of the noise and chaos and we hiked back up “our” mountain. Away from the crowds, on the back side of the mountain, we walked along the footpaths and paused to watch the lightning of an incoming storm light up the mountains in the distance. It was a beautiful night with storm winds gusting and thunder in the distance and when we reached our hostel, we sat on the tables outside and watched the lightning over the Hohensalzburg for about half an hour, I think. The night views of the city were amazing and the lightening even more so. It may be one of my favorite memories of the trip. And we must have had the “best seats in the house” for the storm, because after we’d watched for about 10 minutes, a police van pulled up to the hostel on the footpath and several police officers jumped out, pulled out their cameras and started taking pictures! :)

The hostel proved to be very clean, and I slept great with my earplugs in, though Abbey said the Euro-cup celebration noises went well into the night/morning and they were clearly audible up on our mountain from the city below.
Well, I’ve now typed a full page for this blog entry and should call it quits. The Alps dominate the views out both sides of the train and occasional castle and fortresses dot the lower slopes. Sometimes I can’t believe that I’m actually seeing these sights.