In Salzburg Austria

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We were in 4 countries today by my count. Europe is small and compact, but we still covered a lot of ground. We started in Switzerland, had a pee break in Liechtenstein, lunch in Austria, the afternoon driving across part of Bavaria in Germany and now back in Austria in Salzburg. Two things. Our guide who seems not cut out for this job, failed to notice or mention this fact. 2nd thing, 84! Liechtenstein is my 84th country visited. By day's end, I told Clay I was done, mission accomplished, I got my 4 new countries visited on the trip, I can  quit now. Not really. But we didn't get off to a good start and I'm not talking about our flights. I won't ever recommend Trafalgar. I don't know if I have said that about any other tour provider we've used in the past. We knew they were less expensive because they included less, but that worked for our group. What I didn't know was that the tour director that his job was to earn commissions from forcing the entire group into participating in the optional add ons. We had wondered prior to today, what is the tour group doing while the optional excursions are going and now we know the answer is nothing. The guide, the bus and driver will leave you wherever it is convenient for them. It is not at all clear that it will be convenient for us. I had decided before arrival that I was not interested in the majority of the options, but after the ridiculous morning of forced sales spiel, I balked at booking any of them. Carol has never been to Europe before and so I think she booked 3, Mom booked 1 and Clay & I zero. After he started the morning on the bus by announcing that everyone will visit Eagle's Nest in the morning because it will be too inconvenient and time-consuming for us to bring the bus back to the hotel before going on to Vienna tomorrow. That just rubbed me wrong because we didn't pay over $3K a head to be at his convenience, we paid for him to be at ours. Evidently at least 4 other people felt that way because he muttered a lot about it to the local guide but they decided he had to let us sleep in, eat a late breakfast or whatever we wanted to do and he had to come back for us. I believe he felt he was retaliating by announcing to the bus that those people will have to haul their own luggage out to the bus tomorrow and forfeit porterage. I promise you that the Trafalgar sales information does not frame their tours and options in this context. I have a bad feeling this is going to get worse and not better as the tour progresses because there are days with up to 3 optional tours going! If he carried on like this over 1 optional tour, I cringe to think about those busier optional days. Oh well, live and learn. We will never to another Trafalgar Tour and would certainly never recommend them.

Back to today. As I said earlier, we crossed several borders and our guide never made a single announcement about it. We figured out Germany because they had something resembling border security and we were using Clay's smartphone GPS to track our location since we weren't getting any "guidance" from our tour director. He does a poor job when he does explain something and he always waits to start until it is time to unload the bus when he should just be telling us what time and where to be back. Lunch today was at a truck stop cafeteria called Rosenburger.They serve traditional Austrian food. Stephane told us about some dishes to look for after dinner tonight. Not too timely. He told us before lunch toilets would be free at places where we ate. He told us after lunch that wasn't true here but you could use your toilet receipt to apply the cost to your purchase. That was true, but not timely information since it was too late to be useful. Our schedule was delayed all day because we left Zurich about 30 minutes late because about 1/3 of the bags were not collected until after our scheduled departure time. He blamed the hotel and staff for all of today's difficulties but he bore a greater part of responsibility than he gave himself and he still should have recovered and moved on and quit blaming everything that went badly today on the Radisson Blu!

Today bags out at 6:45am, breakfast was to start at 6:45am but most of us were there earlier without a problem for the hotel. The bus was to leave at 7:30am but didn't til about 8am. We drove through a varied and spectacular landscape today. Leaving Zurich we hadn't driven long before entering a 15km tunnel! They were still growing a lot of corn leaving Zurich for Liechtenstein. We got to Liechtenstein after 9am and had about 30 minutes there to use the restrooms,, pay to get a tourism stamp in our passports and wander. It was what I was expecting from the capital city of a small principality, unlike Luxembourg. There was no HOHO bus here but a little fake train like in Monaco. I saw it twice while off the bus! During the afternoon we entered Germany, We drove for a while beside Lake Chiemsee which started a long lecture on King Ludwig and his palaces, none of which we'll visit on this tour.Too weird. 

We arrived in Salzburg around 4pm. We were late and had a local guide scheduled. Stephane is not licensed to guide in Austria or Italy, I believe he said to explain the local guides in the itinerary. We did not have time now to check in and stow our belongings, but were past due a pee break. So he had us rush in to use the hotel facilities which we overwhelmed the 2 toilets! They unloaded the checked bags and Stephane picked up our keys, so people could drop out of the tour at will. We all got maps of Salzburg with the hotel marked by Christina our local guide and our keys and the bus took us to Mirabell Garden. It was stunning. The city is Baroque and beautiful. It is famous as the birthplace of Mozart and for the filming of scenes from the movie Sound of Music. We walked by I believe Mozart's 1st leased house, over a key-laden pedestrian bridge into Old Town. We walked through tunnels in buildings and down pedestrian areas and saw Mozart's birth house, University Place, through a fruit market, to the Dom and Residenzplatz, around to the Mozart Statue. It was a hot but short 1 hour tour. I don't know if was always only supposed to be 1 hour but it seemed like the guide kept talking about what she was skipping due to our time constraints. Who knows? They left us there with instructions to be back less than 2 hours later at 7:20pm because our driver was doing us a huge favor by volunteering to pick us up on the main street by the last bridge in town to drive us back to the hotel before risking a ticket by driving past 7:30pm. We all either had to get back to the bus or else carry all our self-stowed carry-ons all afternoon! All this didn't get decided until the bus stopped in front of the hotel for our pee break! This was our first time in Salzburg and I'm glad we got to see it. I'll also be really glad to sleep in tomorrow, have a late breakfast and drag my suitcase downstairs myself after 11am. The Austria Trend Europa Hotel is not as nice as the Radisson Blu (which I now expect to be the anomaly hotel!) but we won't be on the bus or on our feet! We spent our free time hunting down dinner in Old Town. We had planned an inexpensive place near the hotel but that wouldn't work now. Christina told us about Mozart Nockerl, a meringue dessert and I really wanted that, but she could find that any close restaurants served it. She sent us to a place further afield that she knew served it, but when we arrived around 6pm, they told us they couldn't take us without a reservation. Too bad. We tried a couple more places but it was very busy at that time in Old Town, all the casual places were closing for the day and everything was about half again as expensive as the place we'd picked before arriving. Finally, a drinks and snacks place that seated us and then told us they had stopped serving food referred us to Saran in the distance. It was good food and good service if more than we'd thought to spend. It is Europe, but it just chaps to be charged for water! The quest for ice is still nearly a full time job!

Good night! Tomorrow we arrive in Vienna for 2 nights.

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