Lori and Troy do Europe 2025

Today we had late checkout just in case we got too tore up at Oktoberfest. It was not needed fortunately. Finding a breakfast joint n Europe is no easy task. I think they live on coffee, bread and cigarettes as that is readily available. We ended up finding a “cute” cafe and had eggs, potato’s and bacon. Something that we have not seen for 2 weeks.

We worked our way through the train system to Munich’s hbf (main station) with no problems. We have reserved seats and now that we were recently schooled on seating we finally thought that we conquered Germanys rail system. Not so fast! We confidently boarded the #27 car where we found our seats. We settled and even helped some fellow passengers locate some seats. Here comes the ticket guy. I whip out my phone and show him my ticket. He then says those are the seat reservations but not the train ticket. Huh!? Why would I have a seat reservation and not a train ticket? Well they sell seat tickets without train reservations. I think they turn off the A/C when they find a stowaway because it got real hot all of a sudden. The guy stood there and waited while I frantically searched for a ticket in the app. Lori is googling directions and we were both just hitting buttons on my phone and getting nowhere fast. The guy got tired of waiting and said that he would be back. After about 30 minutes of shear panic the ticket popped up on my phone. I still do not know what sequence that I pushed to arrive at that but the A/C came back on. Germany was a transportation defeat. Maybe I can restore Lori’s faith in Austria.

We arrived in Salzburg, Austria, walked out of the train station and our hotel was about 50 yards away. Nice work Lori!

We decided to do a little exploring in the old part of town. The new part of town was bombed in WWII by the allies and is now considered new. The old part has a very large castle and many old churches. We found a small restaurant and had Goulash and Spatzle which is dumpling like noodles with cheese and onion. The Goulash was delicious and similar to beef stroganoff! We found another Rick Steves audio tour and started that. It led us right into another Oktoberfest which was pretty nice and a lot smaller than Munich. The audio tour weaved in and out of the festival. We reached a locked gate that lead to a cemetery. Also on the tour but the gate was locked. There were some people on the other side trying to get out while we were trying to get in. I think we had the better situation. We figured that we had never seen anyone dead above ground in a cemetery so…. We tried to finish out the tour but wandered into a “super cute” part of town where we ended the tour. We walked around for a while and bussed back to the hotel. Bussing was free for 3 days so that worked perfect.

Tomorrow we head to the Eagles Nest (Hitlers mountain hideaway) by bus.