Salzburg Austria - Aug 23 to 25, 2009

Salzburg, the birthplace of Mozart. This is also where the movie, The Sound of Music took place. You can feel the rich musical heritage throughout the city. When you walk down the street the buskers aren't the usual talentless hobos, haha. They are professional violinists or string quartets. They all have CDs available for sale and you actually feel an urge to stop and listen. One band in particular caught our attention. Mainly because of the instruments they were playing. A Bayan (Russian Accordion) 2 Balalaikas (like a small guitar with 3 strings) and a Balalaika Bass (like a stand-up bass with 3 strings). We had to look online to figure out what they were playing. The sound was incredible. Jess has another instrument he is determined to play now. Hmmm, that must be about 7 instruments now, maybe he should just finish learning the banjo first!


We spent 4 nights in Salzburg. The first night we did the usual evening exploring. On Monday we visited the Salzburg Fortress, on Tuesday we did a day trip and we had to use Wed to rest. We are getting worn out!

We're getting ahead of ourselves. The first evening we started by walking through a beautiful garden. Salzburg is on the footsteps of the Swiss Alps, so the scenery is breath-taking and the city's pride really shows. We also walked through the old city centre and checked out a few of the churches and old buildings.



Monday was a busy but very fun day. We had to do some laundry in the morning so we didn't get the earliest start, but we got to the Fortress as quickly as we could. We spent the majority of the day there. The view from the top tower was incredible. You had a 360 degree view of the mountains and lakes. The fortress was built by 17 successive arch-dukes. Each one fortified it further and further. It was supposedly impossible in bust into. It has never been invaded, but was given up to Napoleon without a fight. We had took the guided tour and spent a couple hours walking around on our own.








Tuesday we needed a recovery day so we slept in, got did some grocery shopping and took it fairly easy, enjoying Salzburg for the rest of the day.

On Wednesday we did a day trip to Gunzburg, Germany. Why would we go to Germany? Because we didn't have time to make a very important stop... What is so important about Gunzberg?? That's where Legoland is!! The details will be in the next post.