We woke up to a nice sunny day in Zell an See and since we only had an hour and a half drive to Salzburg we planned a loop out into the Austrian hills.
This was thru picturesque Austrian villages, past several lakes, and thru the mountains. It is very green, clean, and very pretty here.
We pulled into the city at just after 4 and it was 28 degrees in the shade and the sun was blazing.
“Salzburg is an Austrian city on the German border, with views of the Eastern Alps. It’s known as the birthplace of Mozart and setting for the film “The Sound of Music.” The city is divided by the Salzach River, with medieval and baroque buildings of the pedestrian Altstadt (Old City) on its left bank, and 19th-century Neustadt (New City) on the right.”
We hid out in the hotel until after 6 and then walked the 2.5 km into the city centre. Here we wandered around the very pretty down town area and then crossed the river and explore the walled old city. There are narrow pedestrian streets with smaller interconnecting alley ways. You have several large squares, a number of churches and the castle towering on the hilltop.
“A Mozart ball or Mozartkugel, is a small, round sugar confection made of pistachio, marzipan, and nougat, covered with dark chocolate.”
Love lock bridges are very popular here.
Even Mc D has a fancy sign here.
This installation art of a number of gerkins was to show how people are like gerkins. They are all different shapes, sizes, and textures.
We are crossing the north of the country from Salzburg to Wien (Vienna). On the small roads the trip is 5 hours, but on the toll road it is only 3. Since we plan to take the toll road to Slovenia later in the week we opted to just get the vignette today. You can buy a vignette sticker at any gas station and this allows you to drive on the highways, but some of the tunnels have extra tolls. So we had a quick, but fairly boring ride to Vienna.
We planned to stay 2 days in Vienna and since hotels and especially the parking rates are outrageous in the city centre we stayed outside the downtown, but with free parking and at a reasonable rate. The hotel is directly on the 71 tram line to the centre. Dan’s 800 was doing some weird things on the way into the city. The dash lights flashing on and off, the fuel light coming on and off. The bike itself was running normally. This had happened one time in Italy for a few seconds, but today it was coming and going. Luckily we were close to the hotel. We hooked up the GS 911, but noted the fuel sensor was displaced from the port by quite a bit and he pushed it back in. The 911 said there was a loss of communication from the cam bus and there were hundreds of fault codes. The problem did not recur and the bike is running well, but there must be a loose or frayed wire somewhere as the fault codes are still occurring. We will have to do a thorough check to find out where.
The city centre of Vienna is very nice with huge wide streets and beautiful gardens and architecture. They even had a surfing training pool in one of the squares.
We did a tour of the grounds of the Belvedere castle and the Wei Wei art installation that was set up there. Part is a lotus shaped installation in the pond that is made out of hundreds of life jackets.
Sunset at the museum.
We escaped the heat for a few hours in the Kunsthistorisches Museum of fine art. Here there is a great mix of art forms and styles. There is a large number of “curiosity” objects that the rich collected or used to entertain guests. These included huge rock crystal carved vases that look like glass, all kinds of art with exotic materials, and automatons for example. There also have a nice Roman and Egyptian exhibit. We also managed to have some pretty good Wienerschnitzel in Wein!
