Saturday, January 19, 2013 (Day 10)
It’s another travel day. Today we’ll take the train from Vienna to Zell Am See. Vienna is on the more northeastern side of Austria, and Zell Am See is just west of central Austria. It is a ski town just south of Salzburg. We were really wanting to hit up Salzburg and take the Sound of Music Tour on this trip, but we decided that tour was better in the summer and we’ll just have to come back. Salzburg is having a Mozart Week the week after we leave the country, too.
We checked out of our apartment last night and they told us that since no one was coming to our apt for a few days, we could stay as long as we wanted. We didn’t stay very long, though. We were pretty much packed up and ready to leave by around 11am or so. We had a couple transfers to get to the train station. We took the U1 to the U3 to Westbanhof, and then bought our train tickets to Zell Am See. We arrived with plenty of time to spare, too, so there wasn’t any last minute running around.
Austrian country-side
Our train to Salzburg ended up being delayed about 12 minutes and since our transfer time in Salzburg was exactly 12 minutes, we were a little concerned. The ride across the country, though was a beautiful one with all the snow-covered landscapes to look at. We did arrive in Salzburg about 10 minutes late and managed to make our connecting train, just barely, to Zell Am See. The total trip was around 4 hours and we disembarked in Zell Am See as the sun went down.
Zell Am See is definitely a little tourist town in the mountains. Our walk to the hotel was across a large pedestrian way filled with shops. The hotel, Grüner Baum, was very easy to find with it’s attached restaurant right in the center of town. We checked in and were happy with our accomodations complete with large shower and porch.
hotel room
At this point, all that was left was to unpack, settle in and find some dinner. The town is very pedestrian friendly and all the streets are lined with twinkly lights up above the streets. With the light dusting of snow on the ground and the lights twinkling, we thought it was rather pretty indeed.
Tonight we will work on planning out our itinerary for our stay here and tomorrow we will start our snow-fun.
Not many photos today, so here's a cold duck photo from Vienna a few days ago