Grüss gott from Austria! We've arrived in Salzburg after a two-night stopover in Hallstatt. Hallstatt is absolutely gorgeous, in spite of the fact that it was cloudly pretty much the whole time we were there and it rained quite a bit as well. The clouds rolling off the mountains and the deep Alpine lake are quite the site to see.

Hallstatt is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and as a result they're able to pour a ton of funding into what makes the city special. It's most famous for the salt mine, which has been actively worked for the past 7000 years. We toured the mine and it's a ton of fun - you get to ride a funicular (sort of like a roller coaster up the side of the mountain) up to the mine and during the tour you get to use a couple of the wooden slides used by the miners hundreds of years ago. They're a blast. We didn't learn all that much about salt mining, but we had great fun with the goofy outfits they make you wear. The salt mine is also famous because of the large number of archaelogical sites discovered as a result of mining activity, including a Bronze Age Celtic burial ground and a prehistoric man preserved in salt. We were able to see some archaelogists at work while we were there.

We also explored the Dachstein Eishöhlen, which are a series of limestone ice caves discovered around 1910. Even with the cable car to take you up most of the way, it's still a pretty tough hike to the cave entrance and the paths inside are steep, full of stairs, and potentially fall-inducing as a result of melting ice. I can't even imagine how the little Yorkie we saw on the tour (dogs are apparently allowed) managed the trip up. We weren't able to get many pictures of the caves because flash photography isn't allowed, but it was very beautiful to see.

Dinner in Hallstatt was quite the experience - we ended up both nights at the only restaurant in town that appeared to be open. As a result, it was pretty much filled with American tourists. The wait staff, being total good sports, played along with our obnoxiousness and the dinners were a lot of fun. Adam's favorite part was the extremely tall bus boy (we calculated that he's about 6'7"), and I got a big kick out of the rather tipsy American woman inviting everyone up to the hotel room she was sharing with her aunt to get bombed on apple schnapps made by her German husband's relatives.

We arrived in Salzburg around lunchtime today and we spent the afternoon on the famous Sound of Music tour. Adam's never seen the movie and I barely remember it so some of the sites were sort of silly, but we got the opportunity to take a luge ride - totally awesome. You slide on a little sled down a winding metal track in the middle of the Alps - how many times in life do you get to do that? I wish we'd had time to ride more than once, but sadly we had to move on.

Tomorrow we're headed back to Munich for a brief 3-hour stopover at Oktoberfest, and then it's off to Zurich to catch the plane home. It's been a great trip - I hope you've enjoyed following along!