Salzburg

I am taking a brief break from my school work to update this from our amazing trip to Salzburg. We made the 3.5 hour drive last weekend, and explored for two days. The weather really sucked (do you see a pattern here?), but we powered through and made the best of it. The city is beautiful - even through heavy fog, and it is relatively small, so you can visit everything by foot. I chose an awesome hotel (sometimes I don't fare so well in that department), and we really enjoyed our time there. It was a fancy-pants kind of place, and they even had a champagne breakfast buffet in the morning ... oh la la.

Here are some pictures from our trip ...

Salzburg is the birthplace of Mozart ... which also happens to be Elliott's favorite composer. As a baby he watched that freaking Baby Mozart about 9 million times ... so we thought it was only proper to take him to see all of the Mozart sights. The picture below was in the gift shop of Mozart's childhood home. You could tour the place, but it was like 11 euro a person, and we don't like Mozart that much ...

This is a big fountain in the Residenzplatz ... it is one of the cooler fountains we have seen in Europe ... the detail was amazing ...

 Next we went into the Salzburg Dom - which was beautiful. These pictures do not do justice for this church. Mozart was baptized here ... which I thought was pretty cool! Elliott soon figured out that his voice echoed in here, so we did a quick tour as he started to scream random words just to hear the effect ...

Creepy statue outside the Dom ...

This was a weird statue in another main square downtown ... from a distance I really thought there was a man standing on this ball (I should probably get my eyes checked), but in fact it's just a statue ...

The Salzburg Fortress from downtown ...

Standing in from of the Neptune statue downtown ...

Another statue ... Elliott's favorite ...

He would have played on and around this statue for hours if we let him ...

Walking like a little man ...

Love this picture ...

He had the whole thing to himself ...

Picture of the statue with the Dom in the background ...

Statue at the Residence ... the wall behind is a cave texture ... very cool up close ...

So we're strolling down the street and we see this cute little travel agency, so I'm checking out some of the trip prices ... then I see this cute little German model house. Cute, right?? Then I looked at the detail ... ummm, those are tiny little penises painted on the house ... with tiny little penises dangling from the roof. What in the hell? Only in Europe ...

That night we ate at a really good Italian restaurant, and headed back to the room a little early so that Eli could get a good night's sleep.

The next day we woke up super early and made sure we took full advantage of our champagne breakfast buffet. After that we headed out to check out the fortress, and a few other sights that we missed. We basically had the city to ourselves ... Europeans tend to lay low on Sundays.

We messed around at the big weird statue ...

We took a train up the mountain to see the fortress. Funny story ... we jumped on the train with what appeared to be some sort of Asian tour group. They didn't speak any English, but thought Elliott was the coolest thing ever. Anyway, they all pulled out their cameras and started taking pictures of him ... like dozens of pictures each. It was really awkward, but he was loving the attention ...

View from the fortress ...

I don't know what kind of face I'm making ...

Cannons inside the fortress ...

These were weird wells and the floor underneath was filled with money ... we didn't quite understand that, but Vic said it reminded him of The Goonies ...

Another view from the fortress ...

This is carved into the side of the mountain ...

Cool bubble guy that Elliott loved ...

One of our last stops was Mozart's birthplace. 

We really, really loved Salzburg and we would ideally like to go back when the weather is nice ... if the weather ever gets nice. We pretty much have our trip itinerary planned out for our remaining 18 months ... and it's pretty jammed packed. We are starting to face the fact that there may be a few places on our 'bucket lists' that we just may not get to, but we are going to try our best!! We need someone to come and watch Elliott for like two weeks so we can go on a whirlwind tour of Europe ... any takers??? We love traveling with him, but it sure is a lot of extra work!!

This past week we made another long drive to the military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany so Vic could get his foot surgery. Everything went well, and he is at home recovering as we speak!! Lucky for him - he has 30 days of convalescent leave, so he has plenty of time to heal and relax.

We will be taking it easy at least for the next few weeks. Work ends for me on June 13th!! I am really excited to have free time, and take Elliott on some little day trips. I am currently working through a couple of courses and one of them is just horrible. I am trying to get the hardest ones out of the way first, but I am really in over my head with this particular one!! Luckily it is only five weeks long, so I just have to 'embrace the suck', as they say in the Army, and finish it up!!