Our hotel room was very small and adorned by a very interesting tall angled window. Not unlike one you would find in an old castle for firing arrows, but slightly wider. As usual, I opened the window up for some air. I find that the rooms are kept extra warm in most places we have visited.

The window opened up to other buildings tightly packed together and forming what might have been some kind of small inner courtyard. We could not really see any thing out the window. Only other windows and walls from the nearby buildings, nor could we see down due to the angle of the window. We could however hear the sounds of the stacking of dinnerware and other kitchen sounds from the restaurant below. There were suites on our floor endowed with fancy names like King Gustav, Duke Marcus, and so on. Our room was not so graced, and due to the size of the room and the angle of the window, we mused that our room might have at one time been the shared floor privy.  Anything’s possible in a place that says “hospitality since 1342”.

castle-lookout-copy

The view from the castle

Our final adventures in Austria began the in evening while getting ready to call it a day. Not only were the church bells calling out the quarter hours, there was the addition of what sounded like a giant with asthma, a wheeze and hum, or maybe someone firing up a massive pipe organ, but no music followed. Odd we thought, what could that have been? A few minutes later there was a loud sound of explosives, or a tower falling, or canon fire.  The whole curious audio scene repeated itself again early in the morning.  As it turns out, the sounds we heard were from a large aerophone, a musical instrument of sorts, known as the Salzburg Bull, built into the powder tower of Hohensalzburg Castle up the hill, that where they play different sound effects at very loud volume every day at 11 p.m. and 7 a.m..

We got our breakfast with all the usual Germanic choices one comes to expect when traveling in these regions.  Lots of rolls and breads, cheeses and cold cuts, hard boiled eggs, cooked meats and more breads.

We set out into the rainy day to visit Hohensalzburg Castle high on the hill. After that, leaving the old town was an adventure in itself. The area is limited vehicle access and we had to have a code from the hotel to get into the old town last night.  Then, once in, it is a maze of one-way streets and people/bike access only. We got trapped inside the maze, going in circles as Paul likes to do, and none of the exit barriers would drop for us. On the way, we were greated by someone who told us we should not be there with a car and that the exits closed at noon (which it was now past) and that we would need to see the police to get the code to drop the exit barrier. Paul walked back to the hotel, got a new exit code (since it turned out to be a timed exit) and we tried again to get out, going through the crowds again but still the code would not work at that gate. We were heading back to the hotel again and took our chances on a street that looked to be promising and sure enough we wound our way around tiny streets and alleyways to a new barrier that did take our code.  One of the local contractors who has been stuck trying to exit in front of us, backed out of the way, then asked if he could use our exit code, which worked for him, too.  Some system.

Onward to Germany, getting a place within 2 hours to the airport, the target being Heidelberg, as we fly out to Iceland in the early afternoon. As we got closer to the German border, the rain started clearing and the blue skies prevailed. There were many wonderful spots of sunlight falling on misty cover mountains framed in dramatic gray clouds, sun rays streaking out from the clouds in all directions, rainbows, just glorious light, none of which we could capture because we were traveling on the autobahn and you know what they say about when in Rome…

We stopped about the halfway point for late lunch/early dinner to keep us going on the road after dark.  We got a cookie from the bakery (which had a great long name in German but pointing it out in the case was sufficient for buying it), got into the car, and our lady of the dashboard navigation had us back on our way in no time.

There was lots of roadwork being done along the way, which hardly slows down the drivers on the autobahn at all. The approaching storm we had noticed when leaving town brewed into something big.  First came the lighting, next the blasts of wind and then sideways rain. It was like we drove into a hurricane in the pitch black. The wipers could not keep up with the rain and it was mostly impossible to see out the windows. The storm did slow down the drivers. The roadway, what you could see of it was filled with the red reflections of tail lights.

There was more lightning and every now and again our dashboard lady’s voice would inform us of dangers ahead. We drove though this storm for a long time, past one toppled tree that was being tended to by a road crew when we came out the other side of it. We could see a crazy cloud front off to the side of us. A clear dividing line of light sky off in the distance and us covered in deep black cloud cover. Very cool and very scary at the same time. We made it to the hotel a little after 8:00 only one hour later than projected arrival time. Not bad when you consider the roadwork and storm.

More from Iceland tomorrow where it is already snowing.