Today we decided to take a day trip to Salzburg.

We bought breakfast at the grocery store, dropped our backpacks in left luggage, and went to see the Glockenspiel play at noon. There was a big gay pride celebration going on all around the center of town with loud pumping music, so it was somewhat difficult to hear the Glockenspiel.

We then got on an 1:27pm OBB RailJet to Salzburg, that arrived at 2:57pm. The RailJet had just one stop along the 90-mile route from Munich to Salzburg, and got up to a max speed of 100 miles/hour. It was a very comfortable train, with nice chairs and good leg space. Also, there was almost no one in our car! In the Munich train station, the main terminal is at the back of the trains. So, we had intentionally walked to the front of the 13+ car train hoping to avoid most of the other passengers.

Once in Salzburg we stopped at the tourist information desk to get a map and some recommendations.  We also stopped by the OBB office to check on return train times, and were given free bottled sparkling water and wipes. Overall, this was a great welcome to Salzburg.

We then bought an all-day bus pass and took the bus to the town center. From there we saw various churches, streets, statues, river views,  and gardens. All while surrounded by some pretty awesome looking mountains. We had an ice cream snack (€1 per scoop), which seemed to be very popular in Salzburg. JT had ‘nutella’ and Katie had ‘cookies’.

We then headed back to the train station. We tried to go to a market about 0.7 miles from the train station (since we had a deposit from there to use), but learned from fellow shoppers that it was closed when we were almost there. Hence, we just picked up sandwich supplies, pudding, soda, coffee, and a couple beers from the rather large grocery store in the train station.

We then got on the 7:02pm RailJet (#66) back to Munich. We sat at a table across from an older, mostly blind woman. We made our sandwiches and ate dinner, and eventually got to talking with the woman. She was coming from Hungry, traveling to Munich to see her daughter and grandsons. She grew up in Hungry, but was currently living in Italy. She shared a homemade Hungarian dessert bar, and (in stereotypical Italian ‘mother’ style) insisted that we help her finish it.  In ‘exchange’ she asked for our help in carrying her two bags off the train and onto the platform in Munich.  She worked as an engineer for years (“even for the Americans”), and in general was a fascinating person.

After helping our new friend onto the train platform, JT ran to get our backpacks from left luggage while Katie checked the connecting train’s track on the board.  We made our connection to a 8:20pm ICE train to Frankfurt with no issues.  The ICE train was also very comfortable, and was not crowded at all.  We enjoyed the 3 beers we had brought with us on this train, as well as our remaining coffee and pudding.

We arrived in Frankfurt just after midnight.  We got €40 from the ATM and checked the train options for tomorrow as we needed to meet Matthias from Nao Devils at 3:30pm to get our robots that he has so nicely been storing. He’s even being so nice as to bring them to the airport for us!

We didn’t book a hotel for the night, so we walked out of the train station and stopped at every open hotel or hostel we found until we found one that would accept €40 for one night. JT did a good job with negotiating, and we ended up staying at City Hotel Apadana (Booking.com).  It was okay considering we were in a pinch, but we likely would not have purposely booked here.