This was our first morning in Munich and we headed out for a day trip to Salzburg, Austria. We did the usual touristy things, although I probably did less than everybody else, since there were no organized activities and we were on our own. The photos tell you about as much as I can remember.
I took many more photos in Salzburg than are revealed here, but since most of them seemed quite unremarkable, I spared you that excess. I recall passing by Mozart's "Geburtstag" (birthplace) but not going in. I recall eating lunch at the Austrian equivalent of a fast food restaurant, having the wienerschnitzel, of course. It still took 20 minutes, very fast by European standards. This does not make for exciting commentary, so I'll move on to a couple stories about driving in Germany:
I'm not clear on what day this happened, but we were on one of the much vaunted Autobahns and I was driving one of the vans. The technique we used when we wanted to change lanes was for the rear, back vehicle in the caravan to make the lane change first, thereby blocking the lane to other traffic and allowing our other vehicles to slide over easily. I was driving the rear vehicle this time and for some reason decided we all should get in the fast (left) lane. Mind you, I thought we were making fantastic speed, at times going 150 kilometers per hour (93 miles per hour) or faster.
What I didn't understand was that, in Germany, you MUST yield the right-of--way to any vehicle going faster than you are in the fast lane. So, up came this Mercedes or BMW going maybe 15 m.p.h. faster than we were and flashing its lights, the signal to move to the right-- a signal that "must" be obeyed. Believe me, the Germans believe in obeying! But-- being the ignorant American that I was, I held my ground and mentally told him to go to hell, forcing him to slam on his brakes, honk his horn and probably curse up a blue streak. That was the closest I came to having an accident during the trip.
The other story-- Again, I don't recall which day this was:
We were driving on the outskirts of some town in Bavaria and wanted to stop on the side of the road-- on the shoulder-- just to get out and stretch. As it so happened, we chose an area where there was a sign in German, but we knew what it said, which was "No Parking". We reasoned that we were only "stopping" and it wouldn't hurt anything if we were there for 15 minutes, since we were safely clear of traffic.
Much to our amazement and amusement, two or three citizens came up to us (separately) and quite forcefully insisted that we MUST move on. In the U.S., no private citizen would bother to do such a thing! The Germans believe in order and following the rules. Anyway-- back to the events of this day...
We returned to Munich, where Bill and I had the most expensive meal of the trip, dinner at the restaurant across the street from our Hotel Maria. I remember part of the meal involved a sampling of many scrumptious meat delicacies, finished off by one large stein of beer each, to the accompaniment of an "oom pah pah" band. It was worth every bloated Deutsch Mark we paid! Later, we joined others from our group to "party hearty" at a downtown beer hall, with predictable results.
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