Monday In Salzburg (State)

Just to clarify, Salzburg is both the name of an Austrian Federal State and the well-known city within that state. Get it? We weren't going to the city but were going to be staying in the state for a few nights.

Woke up and had a quick breakfast with Franz and Margot. The night before, driving down the hill from dinner, Franz pointed out an old farmhouse where the local beekeeper lived. It was too late to buy honey that night but Franz wanted to walk up the hill Monday morning to buy a couple of jars for B. I walked up with him.

A pleasant morning---sunny, Spring-like. Along the way we passed a traditional Carinthian barn.

Carinthian barn in the background. The "windows" with patterned tiles allowing air flow to 

dry hay, etc.and the triangular shape of the leading edge of the roof are typical of this region.

The beekeeper, Michael, is a social worker and his wife a teacher. Their day jobs. But they're also honey producers. They live in an old farmhouse they're refurbishing, some parts of which are about 500 years old. The walls are about 18 - 24 inches thick. The honey-producing equipment, the stock, some hives ready to be harvested, etc. are all downstairs and the family lives upstairs.

We bought a couple of jars of honey, each 1/2 kilo. Michael threw in a smaller jar as a free sample. It was 12 Euro, about $15.50, and the honey was delicious as I soon found out---they invited us upstairs to their living quarters for our second breakfast of the day. The wife told me: "Put some butter on the bread, then some honey, then this cheese." Sounds odd but it was really tasty.

I had a bunch of questions about bees. My German sucks and Michael didn't know much English but with Franz as translator, we learned some interesting stuff about bees. Each hive can have up to 50,000 bees. The bees find flowers and come back to the hive and do a dance which tells the other bees where the flowers are, with an accuracy of half a meter. The male's (drones) only purpose is to mate with the queen, which they do in flight. Then the "lucky" "winner" dies. I saw obvious analogies to human mating but I kept my thoughts to myself.

The queen lives in a special part of the hive and is attended by a small group of bees who have a special status. There's a pecking order with bees, as with humans. Also, sometimes it's necessary to move hives but it has to be done in very specific ways, moving the hive first in the same direction the bees usually approach it from (say, north) so the bees can find it, and then moving it wherever you ultimately want to put it. Michael says it takes the bees three days to learn the new location.

Back downstairs, Michael showed us full honeycombs, thick with beeswax and honey. It looked like really thick axle grease. Delicious, delicious axle grease...

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Back home, we said goodbye to Franz and Margot. Great people, and they showed us great hospitality.

Fun auto parts factoid: one of the brake lights was burned out. We stopped at a garage to get a replacement. Cost of bulb: 6 fucking Euro, about $7.80.

We drove through more towns with lakes. Guys in rowboats, standing up, fishing. Sailing. And para-gliding---the fliers jump down from the nearby peaks and sail over the lake in circles before landing. It was a beautiful thing to see, these guys cutting circles in the sky as we drove along...

After lunch, a surprise: to save driving time, and give little John X a new experience, B had booked passage on a car train...you drive the car onto a train which then (in our case) goes 8 kilometers through a tunnel. Drive on, drive off.

 Drive on, put the car in first or PARK, set the brake, go to the passenger car. 

Train chugs through tunnel, you exit train quickly, drive off. Efficient and ingenious.

Possible downside: being the 21st car in line when the train only holds 20 cars. We were 5th in line.

After a while we came to Bad Gastein, a town famous for its healing waters / spas. It's a very hilly town and there's a large waterfall that, uh, falls right in the center of town. Check out the link and the pics.

B had arranged for us to stay in a farmhouse for a couple of nights between the towns of Rauris and Wörth. I didn't really know what to expect but it turned out the "farmhouse" was more like a nice B & B. Yes, the guy who owned the place, Tony, really is a farmer whose family has owned the farm for generations, but the accommodations were very nice and very reasonable---20 Euro per night, including a good breakfast.

Haus Mittermoosen

We checked in and met Tony, and the lady who runs the place, Christl. Over the next few days we really came to appreciate Christl's hospitality. I highly recommend staying here if you're ever in the area, no kidding.

 The view south from the front of the Haus Mittermoosen, our B & B

We drove down the road for an afternoon hike in the Nationalpark Hohe Tauern. This beautiful alpine national park has great hiking, biking trails, and all the nature you'd ever want to see, including a fast-running mountain stream. The whoosh of the rushing water creates a certain kind of calm high....

In our short walk we came across wild strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries. These wild berries are small but really flavorful.

Wild raspberries, about the size of a peanut.

Take a walk on the mild side.

After a while we drove back toward our room, but stopped first at a restaurant called Gasthof Andrelwirt, which evidently has been in business since 1486. With that history, we figured the food would not suck. No, it did not----assumption confirmed. We sat outside and enjoyed the setting sun.

Gasthof Andrelwirt

Back at our B & B, I stepped out onto the balcony for a look at the stars. Several hundred meters across the road were mountains, and just over the top of these silhouetted bergs I saw the bottom of the Big Dipper, resting there as if it was a pan held over a stove. I saw a few shooting stars. 

Just stood there a while, listening to "Dark Side Of The Moon" on my MP3 player and realizing I was a long way from Oklahoma.