October 28
Sam
This morning we got some pastries from a bakery nearby and chose to go exploring because the town was beautiful and we wanted to learn about the city. We also bought some freshly roasted chestnuts from a street vendor because none of us had ever tried them before and they smelled really good. I didn’t really like them, but Mom did.
We walked along a moat in the centre of the city crossing some really cool bridges, playing at a park for a few minutes, and checking out a few gift shops, until we saw a giant bridge with a roof covered with grass. It looked cool, so we went to check it out.
We learned that the bridge was part of something called les ponts couverts (the covered bridges) and you can walk through the bridge or on top of it. We chose to do both, and got some cool pictures.
We ended up spending the whole day exploring the city before we went back to the Airbnb.
The gift shops all had cuckoo clocks in them…
For dinner, Mom made us schnitzel with spaetzle (German noodles). We had delicious tartes aux framboises.
October 29
Sam
Today it was raining all day, but we still wanted to explore the city some more. We ate at a place called “Au pain de mon grandpère” for breakfast, and it was amazing.
We also went in the cathedral today and it was beautiful because of all of the stained glass windows inside. We walked around looking at some gift shops, and my mom bought a scarf.
For lunch we had sausages, quiche, and pretzels. We also went to a park that was really cool. Lastly, we stopped to look at a specialty nougat shop. The nougat was formed into huge cakes! We bought two flavours – Orange chocolate and salted caramel. It was very expensive!! Good thing it’s delicious.
Jenn:
Due to the horrible weather, we came home early in the afternoon and decided to hunker down and have some quiet time. Laundry needed to be done before we packed up for our next destination. Normally, I wouldn’t bore you with such trivial and mundane work, but this “adventure” in laundry was a 12+ hour part of my day and night.
The washer in the apartment was very old but it functioned well. There was no dryer, but I figured I would just hang the clothes on the provided drying rack. No problem.
Haha! What I didn’t count on was the insane humidity in the apartment due to the pouring rain outside and the lack of working heaters. I truly felt like I was living in the past as I devoted all my attention to swapping clothes, using a hair dryer and every possible hanging location in the home. Our host came to fix the radiators, and then I was able to move items around to the heaters and finally get them dry. Two loads of laundry done by 3:30am. Not bad for starting at 1:30 in the afternoon…
Lesson: Look for AirBnBs with a washer AND a dryer!
October 30
Sam:
Today we went on a train to a place called Salzburg in Austria. Salzburg is the place where most of “The Sound of Music” was filmed.
We traveled through a valley of some really gigantic snow-capped mountains and across beautiful rivers. We passed through Switzerland and before, my parents wanted to go on a scenic route through Switzerland, but we ended up going along a really scenic route anyway, and it was part of our Eurail pass. Since there was no train directly to Salzburg from our station, so we took a train to Zurich (big city in Switzerland) and swapped trains.
When we got to Salzburg it was night and we were hungry so we got some food from a nearby McDonald’s then we checked into our hostel.
Sam and Charlotte take on the world! 