We're back from Austria, though I think we're all still a bit on Austria time. Because of the number of pictures and the amount of things we'd like to share, we've decided to break our coverage of the Salzburg trip into three or four pieces.
As I mentioned in the last post, I had a paper accepted for publication in a conference (CODES+ISSS), and part of the deal was that I attend the conference and present my work. We decided relatively early on to try to make a family trip of it. When would we next have a chance to go to Austria with essentially half of the expenses paid? Sure, traveling with a 10 week old could be tough, but how tough could it really be? Hahahaha ...
We thought it would be a good idea to spend a couple of extra days to try to soak it all in, and we settled on a nice little bed and breakfast on the outskirts of the city, Bloberger Hof.
We left Pittsburgh on Thursday afternoon and arrived in Salzburg Friday evening (yikes!). Tired as we were we couldn't do anything more than collapse. I caught a cold at some point on the trip in, and Sarina was exhausted. Fortunately, Micah adjusted to the time change relatively easily and slept eight hours that first night.
We got up the next morning and went down for breakfast. But before, we took a moment to admire the view from our balcony.
The picture below is a panorama built from a number of pictures we took. To make the panorama I used Hugin, a nice bit of open-source software. As always, you can click on the picture to see a bigger version of it.
To make really nice panoramas we would need a better camera; lens flare (I think) causes the white balance to vary significantly.
Breakfast demonstrated just how small the world really is: there were some people from Oshkosh, WI also staying at the bed and breakfast! Linda from Oshkosh held Micah while we ate, and he fell asleep.
After breakfast we set out on a quest for diapers. We didn't bring enough diapers for the whole trip (we would have had to bring an additional suitcase with only diapers), but were assured by the Lonely Planet book on Travel with Children that there would be 24-hour pharmacies with diapers. We asked where the nearest pharmacy was: four bus stops away. We were also told that there wasn't any place that would serve us lunch this far out from the city and that we would have to catch a bus to the city center to eat. Talk about adventure, and all we wanted was lunch and some diapers!
Thinking we might be able to walk to the pharmacy, we set out. On our way, we came upon a lovely little catholic church with a beautiful graveyard.
Eventually we came to the pharmacy. It was closed. It also didn't appear to sell diapers, or much of anything related to babies. Fortunately, we saw a sign that there was a cafe a bit further on, the Killer Cafe. Ironically, the logo was a set of crosshairs, artistically drawn.
After eating a leisurely lunch (the food was excellent! Austrians really know their sausage), we headed back, having eaten but not having found diapers. We ended the day with ...
A bath,
and a lovely sunset.
In all, we really enjoyed our time in the outskirts of Salzburg. It was the anti-touristy area, and it was just lovely.
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