Snowboarding trip, Post 4: Salzburg

On the Friday of our Austria trip, the five of us set off for the Bad Dürrnberg Salt Mine, “Salzwelten”, near Salzburg. After donning the attractive outfits below (to protect our clothing), we were ready for our tour.

On the tour, we rode the miners' train 650m inside the mountain, walked through the maze of tunnels, learnt all about the ancient salt mining practices of the Celts, and even crossed the Austrian-German border (twice) – underground! We crossed a brine lake (27% salt compared to the 3% salt content of the ocean) by silent boat in a dimly lit underground cavern... reminding more than one person of the sixth Harry Potter book!

We also had lots of fun sliding down two miners' slides – check out the video of Donna, Ben and I below on the 42m-long slide. We aren't sitting on a cart or anything – THIS is why we had to wear the overalls!

All in all, it was excellent fun as well as being educational! Afterwards, we had a look around the Keltendorf Celtic Village next to the mine.

Next, we spent some time wandering around the pretty city of Salzburg, with its colourful houses, narrow streets and interesting shops. Salzburg is the town where Mozart was born and The Sound of Music was filmed. Watching over the city from the top of a hill is the imposing medieval Festung Hohensalzburg - an enormous fortress that Jim, Jenny, Ben and I had toured on our 2006 Europe trip.

The five of us enjoyed a delicious lunch at a local guesthouse – cordon bleu or stew for the others, and schnitzel with cranberry sauce for me – an Austrian meal I had remembered from our 2006 trip and that did not disappoint.

We looked through part of the Salzburg Museum, including the Panorama Museum, which housed “the only giant travel panorama still existing in the whole world” - a fantastic 26m (85 x 16 foot) painting of Salzburg by Johann Michael Sattler. The artist took it on “a ten-year exhibition tour of numerous European cities between 1829 and 1839”. It was an incredible work of art – the photos below look like we could be at a lookout overlooking the picturesque city (which still looks fairly similar today), but that is actually the painting. Not bad huh!!

That night was our last at the guesthouse. The next morning, Ben, Donna and I set off, leaving Matt and Kat behind for a few more days in Austria. In the late afternoon, we had an hour or so to look around Zurich with Donna when we dropped her off in Switzerland.

That night (Saturday), we stayed with Elaine and Francisco in Luxembourg again, and were invited to lunch with some of their friends after the meeting the next day.

On Sunday afternoon we drove to France (I think we had tea at a servo in Belgium) and took the EuroTunnel back to England. We arrived in Calais early enough to be offered a place on the train leaving half an hour before the one we'd booked, so we only stopped the car long enough to be checked out by a sniffer dog before we were on the train – the upper level for the first time! We really can't say enough good things about travelling with EuroTunnel.

Anyhow, the next morning, it was off to work for both of us, and our snowboarding holiday was well and truly over. :)