From Salzburg To Venice

Salzburg was a lot better than I expected! We could have easily spent more than the one day there. The city is super clean and all the buildings fit in perfectly with each other. Our short stay here leaves me with very few stories other than just how nice the actual city was. There was a lot of The Sound Of Music stuff around. You could even take a bus tour to all the major sites from the movie. They were basically full of only women. I guess I should watch the move because it's a classic but we'll have to see about that. They played the movie every night in our hostel.

To get away from all The Sound Of Music stuff we went up to the fortress on top of a 300 meter hill and had a coffee overlooking Salzburg. The coffee was expensive but well worth it. And it was a real coffee! You know what I mean if you've been reading Jack's blog.

The mountainous scenery was very impressive from the hilltop cafe. Unfortunately, that's as close as we were getting to the Alps. Actually, that's not true because we had an hour long transfer in Innsbruck where we quickly walked around. The mountains here were almost, if not equally, as impressive as the Fjords in Norway. The train ride after Innsbruck was equally as impressive. I was taking pictures with my hands holding my camera outside a small opening in the train window. Every time a train passed in the opposite direction my camera shook in my hands, almost dropping it. But it was very worth it, as the scenery was gorgeous.

At the end of the train ride we pulled into Venice, the famous floating city. But since Venice is so expensive we had to stay at a hotel outside the city in a small town called Mirano. We got a HOTEL for 20 euros a night and were feeling great! The problem was getting out to this small town. We found a train leading out there but we did not have a map. We bought a map from an information booth but she gave us a Murano map. So, it ended up being useless and once we arrived at the dimly lit, small Mirano station there was nobody there and no map. We started walking towards some country roads and realized we were in some trouble. As we stood there contemplating what to do a super nice bus driver saved us from wandering around all night. He left his normal bus route and after much searching he found our hotel. What is this, lucky time number 20? It feels like we have been very lucky at a few points on this trip. We're definitely due for something to go wrong.

(Don't mind the pink, that's just my camera gasping it's last breath. Unfortunately I have to buy a new camera in Italy. Why couldn't it have broken in cheap Czech.)

The next morning we found a different bus that left 3 minutes away from our hotel and went right to Venice. But hey, if we found that bus the first time we would never have had that worrisome experience. This bus took us to Venice in 50 minutes. After stepping off the bus and walking for 5 minutes all I could think was WOW! I couldn't believe I was in Venice. We took a water bus down the grand canal to San Marco Plaza. We then decided to just walk around and basically get lost. Well actually, we didn't have to try to get lost; I don't know how anyone could figure out their way around the city. There's no cars or scooters anywhere on the island so the streets are super narrow and zigzag back and forth. Many times we went down a path that ended at water. There were only a few bridge crossings and they were tough to find sometimes. But we prevailed and can now say we conquered the streets of Venice.

We could only afford to spend one day in Venice but you really don't need much more time than that anyway. Next destination was Florence. Now I'm only one city behind, as I am in Rome right now. I think Jack has written about Florence though; he's always a city ahead of me. I've been trying to get pictures up but the internet is just too slow. Anyway, it's time to put myself in a Rome touring mindset by watching Gladiator. Until next time, cheers.