Salzburg in the rain

The first weekend in June was the Queen's Jubilee weekend, which meant instead of the normal one day's holiday we get off for the June bank holiday, we were lucky enough to get two days.

While there were lots of events going on in London, we decided to spend the weekend in Austria, away from the crazy crowds that would be headed into London to watch the Jubilee Regatta. Being able to travel without taking too much time off work is too hard to pass up! Plus, you always get a better view on TV anyway.

We flew into Munich on Friday morning, and caught a train from there to Salzburg. Train travel in Europe is so easy, and we were in Salzburg within three hours of landing in Munich.

When we arrived it was bucketing down with rain and freezing cold. The forecast had been for rain showers, but still relatively warm weather, so I was extremely under-dressed. We left our bags in lockers at the bus station, swapped my sandals for sneakers, and headed off to explore the city.

Salzburg is a small city, and we were easily able to walk around within a few hours. The city is mostly famous for being the birthplace of Mozart and for being the setting for The Sound of Music.

We spent some time wandering through the lovely Mirabell Gardens. The gardens are considered to be one of the most beautiful Baroque gardens in Europe, and were filled with brightly coloured flowers which managed to brighten up the grey day!

I could only perch on this for about 30 seconds before my bum got soaked!

As we left the gardens, the rain got considerably harder, so we headed across the river Salzach into the Old Town, which is a world heritage site. We were hoping to take some shelter from the rain in one of the many tiny stores along the cobbled streets.

We came across a store that only sold hundreds of decorated egg shells, stunningly painted in a million different colours. We had come across these before, at Easter in the Black Forest. They are usually hung from trees outside the front door at Easter, much like a Christmas Tree.

They were amazing, but I couldn't imagine trying to get them home without breaking! They were so fragile, but also pretty expensive at 6 Euro's per egg.

Christmas Eggs!

I loved these Halloween Eggs, it was hard to walk away without buying any!

Looking towards The Hohensalzburg Fortress

The rain held off for a while, but started again when I was posing in front of the Church, meaning I had to run back to the umbrella trying hard not to slip on the cobblestones!

Creepy statues..

The Hohensalzburg Fortress

Salzburg Cathedral

We started walking up to the Hohensalzburg Fortress which was high up on the hill overlooking the city, but once again, halfway up it started to rain really hard, forcing us to abandon the walk and head back down to the city, since it was getting really slippery. We did manage to get one photo from about halfway up, but were disappointed we didn't get to go the whole way.

View over the River Salzach

We pretty much took the continuous torrential rain as a sign it was time to move on to our next destination of Sankt Gilgen. We decided to stay in the pretty town of Sankt Gilgen, which is on Lake Wolfgangsee, because it was close enough to Salzburg to enable us to get there easily without having to travel too far, and it was in a stunning setting on the side of the lake. Sankt Gilgen is also the birthplace of Mozart's mother. 

It gets very busy in Summer, and in winter for the Christmas Markets, but we were visiting slightly off season, so it was nice and quiet.

We checked into our hotel, and immediately had a shower and turned up the heating to full blast! We were soaked and had to hang up our clothes on the heater so they would dry.

The people at the hotel refused to believe I wasn't German or Austrian, and continued to only speak to me in German, while speaking English to everyone else! Seriously, I really need to learn German since this keeps happening to me.

The view from our Hotel room

We eventually warmed up and, as the weather had cleared, decided to explore the town. Like many of the small towns we have visited in Germany, Sankt Gilgen is very picturesque. Even with the grey weather it was a lovely walk down to the lakeside.

The view across the lake was amazing! It was impossible to take a bad photo, the fog shrouding the mountains made it seem very magical, and I think the view was more stunning than if it had been sunny and clear.

In the four days we spent in Austria, I took over 800 photos. I've spent the last week editing them and trying to choose which lake photos to post. I ended up deleting about 300 photos. How many photos of one lake do you need!

Leather jacket completely unsuitable for rain and cold

We saw this tiny little bird on our walk, it was so cute! Heaps of people were stopping to look, so we moved on hopeful someone would help it find its way home.

We stopped at a playground on the way to dinner and had fun on the see-saw, even after realising we were clearly too big! Bradley still finds it funny to sit on the bottom and trap me in the air since I couldn't quite reach the ground.

Having a great time

We had dinner at the hotel just down the road from ours. Austrian food is extremely similar to German food, and was so delicious. I had the meatballs with potato croquettes and Bradley had the beef stew with a yummy kind of pasta we first tried in the Black Forest.

After dinner we headed back to the hotel for a relatively early night, since being a small town, everything was shut pretty much after dinner. Plus, we'd been up since about 4.00 a.m., so we were pretty exhausted by this time.

Thankfully for our next few trips the flights are at a normal time, so we won't have to wake up that early for a while. It's great getting an early flight because we arrive in time to spend a full day at our destination, but I will never get used to waking up that early!