Saturday, July 11, 2009 - Graz to Salzburg.

Graz was a delightful experience and we could have spent days there but this morning we boarded the buses for the drive to Salzburg through beautiful forests, valleys, and villages filled with the alpine style houses with colorful window boxes on almost every balcony. The area is somewhat like the drives around Jasper with some mountains and lakes. On bus two we entered our second day of german lessons: Yesterday we learned numbers, today we learned the phrase: “Um himmel villen” or “for heaven’s sake”. Our destination at first was the small village on the lake called St. Wolfgang but chose to stop at a Benedictine Monastery at Admont. It is the home of the largest medieval library in the world. Though the monastery goes back to 1074 the present library was built in 1776 and was considered the 8th wonder of the world at the time and after visiting it we can understand why it was seen thus. It’s beauty is overwhelming, even against the large church it is beside.
Around 1:30 we boarded the buses to go to St. Wolfgang a tourist village filled, again, with beautiful houses of the Austrian style. We walked through the town, visiting shops, eating ginger bread(something the town is known for, it was good), and enjoying an air show that was going on above the lake beside the town. The town church was built in 976 A.D. - the oldest we’ve seen so far.
At 5:15 we got on a boat to cruise on the Wolfgangsee for around 50 minutes to St. Gilgen where we got on the buses to our hotel in Salzburg. The boat trip started in the sunshine but we entered a downpour but we still got an amazing experience of this lake. At our hotel we had our supper of veal goulash and spaetzle. Tired and a bit wet many made it an early night. PS: We brought along our own lounge piano player so we had some quiet entertainment in the hotel.