Salzburg: Days 9-10 (Plus Innsbruck)

I've been to Salzburg before, and really loved it.  The second time around I loved it less because the sky was so gray!   But its still a really cute town.

Everyone went to the Mozart Residence, which Hyrum and I enjoyed last time we were there.  It had an audio guide that walked you through his life.  Meanwhile, I snuck over to Getreidegasse to get a curry wurst at a place we discovered last trip.  I thoroughly enjoyed my hotdog, despite the rain.  When I met back up with the rest of the fam, they all hated me for sending them to a crappy museum.  Apparently they had a special exhibit up, that caused them to move the normal museum contents elsewhere.  Sorry guys.  Next time we should look online...

The Mozart museum they went to

The other Mozart Museum

We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering over to the fortress and exploring the grounds.  Unlike last trip, we opted to take the train up the mountain instead of walking.  The extra few euro was totally worth it.  The fortress has several little museums, including a marionette museum.

 On Sunday we attended Mass in the Franciscan church in Salzburg, with a visiting choir, then hit up a normal Sacrament meeting in German.  After all that church we headed to the Hellbrun Palace to see the trick fountains.  The palace was built in the 1600's, and the archbishop lived there.  I guess he was a bit of a prankster, because there are water fountains that shoot out all over the place.  I'm sure the tour guide has a blast soaking innocent tourists.  For example, below is a picture of the outdoor dinner table the archbishop used.  When a button is pressed, all the guests get soaked except the person sitting at the head of the table.

At the same place we also saw the famous gazebo from "The Sound of Music."  It was given as a gift to (someone?) and then moved to its current location.  Too bad none of us are 16 going on 17.

We spent that night in Innsbruck, a cute little Austrian town a few hours away from Salzburg.  We explored the city and ate at a pizza place--one of the few restaurants in the town open on Sunday.  Things were pretty quiet while we were there.  The architecture was cool, but when I look back on Innsbruck two things stand out in my mind:

1) For breakfast we found a bakery, that was serving delicious looking cinnamon rolls.  I think we each bought one, and on top of that, they started giving out huge samples of the cinnamon rolls.  The lady came around a few times offering us more... for free.  We definitely filled up till we almost exploded with sugar.

2) Before leaving Innsbruck we had to find a grocery store to buy drinks to wash down the sugar.  We found 1.5 liter drinks for a dollar.  Road trip score!  And Matt found the largest jar of Nutella known to man for about 5 bucks.  It traveled with us all over Switzerland, and was almost gone by the time we returned to Vilseck.  

Salzburg

Salzburg is only about 3.5 hours from us.... Located right on the Germany/Austria border.  It's a small town, so easy to walk around and see all the little buildings and churches.  One of our favorite parts was a free [I use that term loosely... hiking up--instead of taking the tram--was PLENTY work!] view of the city from a great fortress on the hill.   Our handy guidebook told us that the castle fortress was so intimidating it was never actually used as such. No one attacked it.  And when Napoleon came along, they had the brains to surrender without a fight.   It would be a loooong fall down the cliff, thats for sure.

View from bottom.

Hyrum managed to find a soccer field far below.  Note the excitement.

This is the long fall down I mentioned.