2011.07.07 – Venice (IT) – Salzbourg (AT)
We had breakfast again at our hotel. After bringing our luggage to the reception, we headed out on a water bus to San Marco Piazza. We considered for a moment to visit one of the museums but the cost and line-up discouraged us. We opted to walk some more along the streets and alleyways of Venice. We stopped and sat down, for a long rest, on a stone walkway at the edge of canal entrance. We had lunch at a local sandwich shop. After returning near to our hotel area, we took the local bus to Mestre, the shadow town of Venice on the mainland. We walked the streets for some time but there were little to see or do there. We took the bus back to Venice. We did a bit of grocery shopping at the Coop before returning to the lobby of our hotel where we finished waiting for our train departure time. We walked to the train station and while we waited for the train we bought some chicken kebab. On our 2nd class train compartment, we met two other single travellers. The first traveller was a girl from New Orleans/Georgia who had been travelling Europe for last three months and the second one was a guy from Manitoba who had been studying music in the US. He was an accomplished pianist that was attending a workshop in Vienna. It was nice to chat about our respective travel experience with them.
2011.07.08 – Salzbourg (AT)
After spending mostly a sleepless night in the train from Venice, we arrived at Salzbourg’s train station at around 4:30am. Seeing signage writing in German reminded us that we had left Italy. We had some difficulty finding our hotel even it was supposedly near the train station. It must have looked strange for any locals seeing us at this time of the morning wandering the streets in search of an hotel. After some failed directions, we finally found our hotel – Hotel Alderhof. We ended up waking up the hotel attendant who was very friendly and allowed us to drop off our luggage before we set out to find a cafe that was open for breakfast. We finally found a bakery that opened at 6am. We were the first customers to walk in. We were all very tired and spent over three hours in the cafe. We opted to take a four-hour “Sound of Music” bus tour at 9am. This seemed like the perfect tourist thing-to-do since we were very tired. The bus tour was quite informative regarding the filming of the movie “Sound of Music”. Victoria and I had a chance to try out an alpine slide along the way. The mountains were very impressive. At the end of the bus tour, we had a quick visit of the Mirabell Gardens before heading back to the hotel. We had a few hours of sleep before going out again for supper. We all tried the Austrian’s specialty – Wiener Schnitzel with some local beer. We walked back to our hotel for a good night sleep.
2011.07.09 – Salzbourg – Vienna (AT)
We went down to the hotel lobby for breakfast, the eating area was quite busy. After a good breakfast, we brought our luggage to the hotel reception and headed out exploring the old town of Salzbourg. We walked towards the old town and stopped along to visit the Mozart museum with audio-phones. It provided an informative perspective on Mozart’s life. We continued our route towards the old town. We browsed a long stretch of craft stalls before heading to the Fortress Hohensalzburg. We took a very fast funicular to the top of the cliff. We had a good visit of the fortress, including the torture room. We walked back to our hotel and headed out to the train station which was a three minutes walk. As we arrived at the train station, we hopped right away on the train after going down and up a set of staircases. On the train, it seemed as though we seated ourselves in a business class carriage but no one disturbed us. Jenny was offered a bottle of water by a train attendant but once she realized that it was not free she quickly returned it. Once we arrived at the Vienna train station, we took a taxi to our reserved hotel – Casa d’Oro Luciani. The hotel’s lobby and courtyard appeared very luxurious. The regular staff seemed to be out and for a brief moment, we had the feeling that we made another mistake with our reservation. Using our Kindle, we managed to review our email confirmation and we were reassured that the reservation was correct. We were finally showed to our room. As we entered the room, everyone’s arms fell down as we didn’t believe this luxurious set of two rooms were ours. Before unpacking our luggage, Jenny and I went back to the reception desk to confirm the price of our room. The regular hotel attendant showed up and confirmed our hotel room price. He informed us that they offered a low price on this room as this week was a low business period. Our unexpected luxurious accommodation reminded us that reserving hotel rooms along our route sometimes provided us with some great deals. We headed out from the hotel at around 8:30pm in the direction of Vienna’s downtown area in order to have supper at a restaurant recommended by the hotel attendant. We bought ourselves 48h transit passes to facilitate our local commute. We were surprised to note how quiet the subway was on a Saturday evening. We arrived at the recommended restaurant to discover that there was a waiting line and the place was closing shortly. We opted for another nearby restaurant where we had huge portion of Wiener schnitzels. We took the subway back and walked 15 minutes back to our luxury hotel. It was 1am by the time our heads hit the pillows after showering and doing some clothes washing.
2011.07.10 – Vienna (AT)
As a bonus to our very nice rooms, we benefited of nice courtesy breakfast. We were surprised to note that we were the only family that showed up for breakfast – unlike yesterday’s experience in Salzbourg. We took the bus to the U4 subway station and headed towards the downtown area again. As we began our walk in the streets, we got enticed by a concert tout. In the end, we splurged and bought VIP tickets for the same evening Mozart/Strauss concert. We visited the Sisi Museum where we spent over two hours. Later on the spur of the moment, we jumped on a tram and ended up in suburb area of Vienna. We took the same tram back closer to the downtown area where we stopped for some ice cream. After, we took the subway to the concert hall neighbourhood where we had supper at a pricey Italian restaurant. Although we were initially disappointed by the location of the concert hall, we were quickly won over after the first piece of music. Sitting along the front row with an unobstructed view of the musicians was clearly a VIP privilege. We enjoyed very much the entire concert which included a few pieces of Opera and Ballet. After the concert we headed back to our hotel using the subway.
