Munich to Salzburg

After a great breakfast at Hotel Prinzregent, we were again on one of those magnificent Mercedes coaches headed to Salzburg. We loved the Prinzregent, but could the five star Hotel Bristol beat that?
It was a surprisingly short ride, just under 2 hours until we reached the birthplace of Wolfgang A. Mozart. This is one of my favorite cities. There is just so much to see and do in this compact, pedestrian friendly old town.

Hotel Bristol

Since we had arrived relatively early in morning and the rooms would not be ready for a few hours, we stashed our bags and with our Salzburg Cards in hand headed into the old town, only a short walk from our hotel.  The Salzburg card gets you free access to just about any attraction in Salzburg that you might want to see. It is a fantastic deal and very convenient because you don't have to wait in line to purchase a ticket.
 I wanted everyone to know where we were having dinner so I led them to Saint Peter's Stiftskeller, reputed to be the oldest continuously operating restaurant in Europe. From there everyone was free to explore and see the sights that would most interest them. I thought for this situation this would be preferable to a typical city tour where you are dragged from one place to another and see most of the sites only from the outside. Some were interested in the catacombs so I lead a group of folks to that and then on to the Fortress Hohensalzburg, the imposing castle which dominates the Salzburg area. Evelyn and I had lunch at a cafe adjacent to the castle with a beautiful view of the surrounding area.

Panoramic view from Hohensalzburg Castle

Then we visited Mozart's Birthplace. This was a very interesting exhibit with a lot of information about his lineage, his home life as a child and his sister Nannerl, who was a gifted musician in her own right. All this made us want to revisit the film "Amadeus". I never thought he was as goofy acting as he is portrayed in the movie, but from what we read, except for his music he apparently was quite child like as an adult.
Since the rooms were to be ready by 3 PM, most of the group wandered back to the hotel by then and got checked in. The hotel staff had delivered our bags before hand. We had a really nice, spacious room. The view from our balcony of the city was great. See the pano taken with my iPhone.

Panoramic view from our balcony

View of Hohensalzburg from our room

Downstairs we found the rest of the group had discovered "happy hour". Our Romanian bar keep was a real sweetheart and kept us supplied with wasabi peanuts, cashews and other snacks and made sure we didn't miss "last call" at the end of happy hour.
Wandering over to the Stiftskeller we found everyone had arrived and some were even already seated in our private dining room. Dinner consisted of Tomato consommé with basil dumpling, Chicken breast stuffed with herb infused quark, served on grappa risotto with a ‘Schilcher’ wine sauce, and for dessert Chocolate soufflé served with sour cherries and kumquats ice cream. It was delicious! After dinner we thought we'd just stroll back to the hotel. Wrong! We had had beautiful weather the whole trip. Even earlier today there was only a slight drizzle. But all of a sudden the skies open up and a deluge was coming down. A few folks who had beat us out the door got soaked walking back. Fortunately the restaurant ordered taxis for us to take us back to the hotel. I was surprised how inexpensive it was.