Salzburg 2

The train to Salzburg rolled thru some wonderful Austrian and Bavarian country side, with the emphasis on wonderful.  Fantastically green fields, distant mountains and the occasional villages with their pointy church steeples.  The route took us across into Germany for a brief time before reaching Salzburg and it's newly built/rebuilt Hbf, (main train station).  

Now came the task to secure a rental car.  After asking around, we did finally got a car, a Skoda, a station wagon-type new automatic with built in GPS,  that for the price should have come with  a chauffeur !!!

We had no real problems getting to St. Gilgen except for one curious condition.  The engin would stop for no reason when I came to stop light or stopped for any other reason and I had to restart the thing all the time.  In fact it got so problematic, that I had to call Avis to find out about it.  As it turned out that this problem was not a problem at all.  They said that all I had to do is touch the gas pedal and the engine would automatically restart, again !!!  I think that it is for saving gas while idling.  What a concept !!  Well with price of nearly $8. a gallon it makes sense, except  it would have been nice to have been told about it.  

We got to St. Gilgen ok and to our friend Runi in the late afternoon.   Runi greeted us oh so warmly.  She had coffee and cake ready and later supper, and we gabbed until about 8pm.  At this point, the days are sort of loosely planed and tomorrow, Wednesday, we are going to the annual St. Rupert festival in Salzburg with Runi and her sister.  Salzburg is about a ¾ hour drive from St. Gilgen.  St. Rupert is a saint who created the greater Salzburg area, put it on the map so to speak, many centuries ago.

Runi's friend, Annemarie, in who's house and apartment we are staying in now again, and have stayed for the last three times before, but this time we have the whole upper floor, living room, bedroom, both with a common balcony, kitchen and bath room, with an awesome view of Lake Wolfgang, is simply fabulous.  

After a great night's rest, I got up at 6:30, watched the sun illuminate the lake and later went to the small market to get some fresh b'fast buns called Semmerl, still warm, some butter, cheese and coffee.  I did not want to mess with making coffee here just yet, because I'm not familiar with our coffee maker.  Now we are ready for a fun day in Salzburg.  

The temperature was in the mid 60s°F in the early afternoon dropping to 60 in the early evening.  We drove in Runi's car, an older four door Mazda, and we found the old part of down town Salzburg was buzzing with people.  It is a semi holiday, big businesses are closed but smaller ones are open, after all, they have to make money.  What it was, it was a Fair, a full blown county fair with shooting booths, carousels and food booths.  We walked for a while, then sat down to a nice cup of fine coffee and a snack, and watched the people.  They bought some tickets for a marionette performance of Mozart's "The Magic Flute" for tomorrow evening.   While Runi has shown me how to get there, I'm still pretty nervous if I will make it ok.  We had a title lunch, and they also got us some ready to eat dinner.  We ended the day with going up to the seventh floor of a very popular hotel rooftop coffee house overlooking the Salzach River which flows right thru the middle of town.  

Back home again, I was beat !!!!   By the way  this whole day's outing was a gift for my and Geneva's Birthday, including the Theatre tickets.