13 September 2017
Important Lessons When Travelling
When travelling it seems timing is everything however regardless of your level of planning there are situations when you will be surprised but what is not open or available. I thought I would provide a quick list of what’s open and when:
- There is a Seneca Museum in Western New York that is NEVER open in January. (We found this out to our great disappointment some years ago.) I understand you may not be planning on visiting this museum.
- The Louvre is never open on Tuesday. (We thought the queues were very short when we discovered it was Tuesday and the Louvre was in fact closed.)
- The shops in Salzburg are closed on Sundays. (Don’t go out shopping for what you might fancy for breakfast – the shops are closed.)
Mountains In Bavaria
They do a very good mountain in this part of Austria and Bavaria. The mountain scenery is stunning and the villages look like something straight off a post card.
On top of these mountains one A. Hiltler had his conference centre where he and his mates made plans for Germany in the 1930’s through to 1945.
As you stand by the fireplace in Eagles Nest you wonder about the conversations there might have been between A. Hitler and say M. Bormann or B. Mussolini. It’s hard to be glib in the context of who these people were and what they did, so I will resist some clever comment.
I guess Adolf liked the location where he wouldn’t be interrupted. The road to the top is steep and narrow and it takes a lot of German organisation to get so many tourists up and down the mountain and to the top via a lift that Adolf would only travel with 6 others. I think there were 46 others when we took the lift. Today nearly 400,000 people visit Eagles Nest each year.
Salt Mines
They have been digging salt out of these mountains at a rate of about 40 tonne of brine per day. That’s a lot of salt. They have been digging up the stuff for the last 500 years so I am guessing that mountain is pretty hollow with some serious caverns within the rock.
Awakening Memories from the Past
My grandmother had a tin box that maybe once contained chocolates or biscuits; in my time it contained pens and pencils. The picture on this tin box was for me a magical place of a lake in high mountains with an insignificant boat in the distance, amplifying the sheer magnificence of this mountain scene. I had no idea where this place could be, to me it was just magical. It clearly wasn’t Australia but it could have been a Norwegian fjord or maybe a lake in Switzerland.
I believe I found the lake; Königssee in Bavaria. Seeing this lake was for me one of those moments when something you experience suddenly brings forward memories from a distant past in just a split second.
Clean, Green and Ordered
Everything in Austria is neat, clean and well ordered. It’s the end of summer and yet the fields are green and lush. At this time our fields in Australia would be brown with little grass left after the summer. In contrast the green here is intense.
The villages are obviously the inspiration for Lego models and model train landscapes. Everything is so well ordered The cars don’t even have mud on them or the remains of thousands of insects glued t the windscreen and front grill. Even the insects know its not acepable to make a mess.
A Traveller's Tale 