Salzburg, Austria Day 1

We headed to Salzburg, Austria with my parents October 19-21.  Mark and I had driven through Salzburg and stopped for quickly for a Christmas market back in 2010, but that was the extent of our visit to Salzburg, so we wanted to go explore a little more, and another short weekend wasn’t nearly enough time to see everything.

We stayed at this little hotel about 10 minutes outside of Salzburg.  It was in a beautiful location and I was excited to find it.  However, there is a restaurant/bar in the basement of the hotel, and on Saturday night, it was pretty darn loud, and VERY smoky.  Even from 2 stories above the bar, it smelled like someone was smoking in our room the entire night, which gave me a headache and was really annoying.  The place has lots of potential, because it is a cute place and the room are comfortable, but the noise and the smoke were really big turn offs.

The drive in the Salzburg was beautiful and I am convinced that fall is the prettiest time of year to travel almost anywhere, especially if you are some place the leaves change color.  I love fall in general, but Salzburg was extra beautiful with all the leaves changing colors.  I think I want to make fall my official season to travel in.  Forget summer when places are really busy and you have to fight heat and crowds.  I much prefer traveling in the fall.

So we really had no clue where we were going, but we headed in to Salzburg to find a place to eat after we’d settled in to our hotel.  One thing I will not miss at all, is trying to find a child friendly place to eat in Europe with 2 small kiddos.  I swear we spend a good 30+ minutes every meal trying to find a place to eat.  It’s not like in the States where pretty much most places are child friendly (have high chairs, changing tables, etc) and are fairly easy to find.  Most places in Europe aren’t very child friendly and the decent places are all spread out and pretty well hidden, unless you know where you’re going.  So I did a quick search on my iPhone for a decent restaurant, not even bothering to try to find “child friendly” and managed to find one that was only about a 15 min walk from where we were.  It ended up being a really nice place (and kind of expensive), but they had a high chair, so I was happy.  The trick to eating in Europe with kids is to GO EARLY!  At 5:30-6pm, try to be seated and then you beat the rush, and can snag a high chair since they usually only have 1-2.

The advantage to wandering around for quite a while trying to find a place to eat is that I got some good pictures in the meantime!

The good thing was that the restaurant turned out to be really good and we all enjoyed our meals.  (And they had a high chair!)  After dinner, we headed back to the hotel to try to get some sleep.  More on our 2nd day in Salzburg soon!

Because I took so many pictures on this trip, I am splitting this trip up into 3 posts for the 3 days we were there.