April 24th; Salzburg, Austria.

We were up, if not fully awake, at 6 a.m. so that we could have an early breakfast and be in Salzburg sufficiently early to be able to wander around the city for several hours. We could have taken a "Sound of Music" tour of the scenes from that movie, but we opted instead for getting a better look at the Hohensalzburg Fortress that sits on a rugged, rocky hill in the middle of the city. We had visited Salzburg in 1973 but our budget had been pinched enough that we had not taken the tour, and ever since then I had wondered what I had missed. Now was our chance to correct that omission.

I had planned to take the funicular up the side of the hill into the fortress, but unfortunately I got completely turned around and we ended up walking once around the hill on side streets before we finally found the walking path that led to the top. Since by that time we were already halfway up the hill and would have had to walk back down to the funicular entrance (wasted effort!), we decided to continue to work our way up on the path. It turned out that our walk brought back some old memories. Monika remembered the path up from 1973 because you walk up a long way to the entrance and you think you've made it, but then you continue to walk up a long way once you are inside the fortress. That part is both an unexpected bonus climb and quite steep. As you continue to work your way up to the main part of the fortress your legs get more and more tired and it seems like you will never stop climbing.

However, once you get on top the views of Salzburg, the Salzach River, and the Alps in the distance are well worth the effort. The Hohensalzburg fortress sits atop a pretty steep, high hill and in fact the fortress was never taken by assault in it's roughly 800 year history, which we learned when we took the castle tour. Salzburg was ruled by its local bishop rather than by any royalty, but they seemed to have approached secular rule in pretty much the same way the surrounding royalty did, and building an impregnable fortress was part of that approach. The original modest fort built in the 11th Century was gradually expanded and strengthened over the centuries by succeeding bishops.

Our tour included a "torture room" that sent chills up my spine even though our guide explained that it had never been used for torture. Rather, the room was used to store the implements used to torture folks in other locations. Looking at the heavy iron chains, shackles, and wheels spread around the room, that fine distinction was not very reassuring. I had to wonder how clergymen who were ostensibly religious could so enthusiastically embrace torture as a legitimate method of treating prisoners, but of course I've recently had to wonder that about my own government, too.

Escaping from the torture room, we climbed a very long spiral staircase to the top of the highest tower in the fortress. Our reward was an absolutely gorgeous 360-degree view of Salzburg and the mountains just beyond it. Looking down into Salzburg we could see the cathedral to one side and the summer residential palace of the ruling bishops on the other side. Off in the distance the snow had already melted off the lower slopes, but the tops of the mountains were still sheathed in a pristine coating of dazzling white.

We completed the guided tour and then looked into the museum and residential chambers in the central section of the fortress. In the museum I was surprised to find uniforms from the Germany Army of WWI and WWII as well as an array of military artifacts. One room even seemed to be set up as a military shrine of remembrance to one of the Wehrmacht divisions.

The actual residential rooms of the bishop were our last stop before we had to head back downhill to catch our bus. The rooms were lavishly decorated with gold gilt, embossed leather, and fancy carving. One curious but beautiful and functional item was a large heating stove with an outside layer of colorful ceramic tiles. From what I could see, the ruling bishops despite any vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, basically lived liked kings.

We took our leave of the fortress and carefully worked our way back downhill toward the bus, holding hands where it was steep enough to easily fall and we couldn't hold on to a railing. Despite being that careful, going downhill was a lot quicker than uphill so we did squeeze out enough time to stop off for a beer, a hotdog, and a chat with Neville and Lyn before we met the group at the Mozart Platz and had to re-board our bus.

The road from Salzburg back to Munich wound around a corner of the Alps that lies between Austria and Germany. In fact, we saw Hitler's "Eagles Nest" perched way up on the very top of a mountain quite near the border. It might be worth a visit because certainly on a clear day like we had, you could see for many miles from that aerie. At the very least, we would like to return to that area to see the town of Garmisch-Patenkirchen and the mountains surrounding it and I, of course, have a yen to fly through the area in a light aircraft.

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We crossed into Germany, the border marked only by a sign, and curled around the northern edge of the Alps to get to Munich. I enjoyed seeing the picturesque farms and pastures of the foothills, but one thing truly astonished me. Some of the farms had absolutely huge arrays of solar panels on the roofs of the barns. Some of the arrays were at least 5 rows deep with at least 30 panels per row, and that was larger than anything I have seen elsewhere on private property. Given that an array of photovoltaic panels that size would be prohibitively expensive, I surmised that the panels were solar hot water used for heating, probably for the barns. I do not know if solar power is subsidized by the German government like the wind turbines are, but it was still powerful evidence that Germany is exploring alternative energy sources far more than we are in the U.S.

Arriving in Munich at 2:00 p.m., we checked into the hotel, picked up our luggage, and said farewell to Osman and Donato with whom we had spent such a pleasant week. We still had some shopping to do in Munich, so we tried to take the train downtown to the Marienplatz station. After missing our first train by seconds, we found that the next two trains had been cancelled. Monika overheard something about a bomb. Living in the U.S. in these troubled times, our first thoughts were, of course, that terrorists had tried to bomb the train station. However, as it turned out what had really happened was that during excavation for a new building workers had found a 500 pound bomb leftover from WWII. They cordoned off the area, stopped the S-Bahns, and had a bomb expert defuse the bomb. Herr Guenther Hanft ended up physically hammering the detonator out of the bomb with a special tool--a brave man, that--and he said he does about 20 such bomb disposals in Bavaria every year. The whole incident goes to show that in Germany as well as other parts of Eastern Europe history has left its own dangers. Impatient with the delay, Monika and I opted to take the long way back into town by going past the airport and back down on the east side of the train loop. Just before our train came, a voice over the loudspeaker announced something about the bomb having been defused, which was reassuring.

The net result of all this folderol was that what should have been a 20 minute trip became a one and a half hour roundabout route into the center of Munich where we finally disembarked at the Marienplatz near the Rathaus. Our first purchase was a small wooden hair brush for traveling from a store that specialized in wooden things ranging from chess sets to cooking spoons to hairbrushes to carved figures from the Erzgebirge. Since Monika desperately needed an angel playing drums to complete her angel orchestra (see Wanderung 2 for details), we also bought one of those. I did wonder for a moment if other travelers purchase the same idiosyncratic, almost bizarre, mix of objects that we do (dolls, children's books and clothes, angels, chocolate, porcelain figures, hairbrushes, old German movies, etc.). Thinking about our fellow passengers, I was somewhat reassured by the fact that Toni had bought a mandolin and Neville a nice violin on the trip, so other folks seemed to at least purchase surprising objects.

We wandered down the main shopping promenade past the Rathaus and other beautiful buildings lit up by the evening sun. The air was downright balmy and lots of people were out enjoying an evening stroll, so we had a pleasant walk. At Kaufhof we found a set of plastic kitchen measuring bowls that Monika desired, and they were even on sale for 10 Euro! But they were also rather bulky, so now we started looking for additional collapsible luggage to accommodate the overflow of things we had accumulated during the trip. At Hertie's we found a small backpack that folds into its own pocket when not needed, so we picked that up and it proved to be just big enough for our extra overflow items.

I was, as usual, also on the prowl for cheap German folk music CDs (see Wanderung 5). Fortunately Hertie's also had those for 5 Euro for a 2 CD set and 7Euro for a 3 CD set, which worked out to the roughly 3-Euro-per-CD limit that I have set for buying folk music. After all, you don't need Pavarotti to sing folk music, so you shouldn't have to pay Pavarotti prices! In fact, great opera singers like Hermann Prey are a disadvantage for buying folk music because their voice has such a huge dynamic range and they tend to use it to full effect. You might not think that is a problem, but in our truck we could not listen to a CD of Hermann Prey singing German folk songs because we simply could not set the volume right. When Prey sang pianissimo we had to turn the volume up, and when he hammered out the full voiced parts we had to turn the volume down or be blasted out of the truck! Happily carrying our collective booty, Monika and I trudged back to the train station for the ride back to Neufahrn. At Neufahrn we discovered we had missed the last bus and had to limp another mile or two back to our hotel past the maypole and the little Neufahrn church. By then we were really dog tired, but Monika repacked our bags and I worked on the journal until it was time for bed.