Salzburg - a detour into Austria
In Salzburg today (an easy detour into Austria) we explored the old city (Craig took a few photos, including one of an Irish Pub! In each old town we've visited we have discovered an Irish pub.) ) before going on a Hop on, Hop off tour of the city. Lots of information about Mozart and of course, The Sound of Music. We stopped off for a tour of the gardens of Schloss Hellbrunn, for a tour of the "Trick Fountains". Both of us ended up getting sprayed with water because we were in the wrong spot! The fountains all operate on the power of water, nothing but water power is used to make them work. The regent (Marcus S .....) who planned the fountains obviously had a lot of fun. The work put into the decoration of the grottos was immense.

Rather than wait 10 minutes for the bus tour to restart, after a short bus trip from Schloss Hellbrunn, we went for a walk through the Mirabell Gardens and then walked back to Mozart Place. There were a couple of fruit and vegetable stands in the old part of the city where we planned to buy some fresh fruit and vegetables. We haven't been impressed with the quality or variety of vegetables in the places we've been in Germany, so this was an opportunity too good to miss. Amongst the large white and green spears of asparagus were some quite short spears of asparagus from Thailand....

Eagle's Nest
It's a religious holiday here and Father's Day in Germany today. All the shops are closed, so only tourist venues and cafes etc are open. It was a rainy day when we set off, but conditions were expected to improve.

You can only get to Eagle's Nest by bus, but you can drive and park close to the place the buses leave from, as we did. The bus goes uphill for 7 km and it takes about 20 minutes. Parts of the road slope up at at least 24 degrees, quite steep! Then you walk through a tunnel before taking a lift up through the cliff for 124m. It takes 42 seconds and is very smooth. You arrive inside the Eagle's Nest and go outside to see the view. Despite the rain, the view was impressive, but it was also quite cold and we were glad of our winter coats.
The actual building is quite small and there aren't many rooms, but the construction work is simple and beautiful. The curved wall is beautifully done with thick walls and deep window alcoves. Hitler, apparently, disliked heights and thus did not have many meetings there. The fireplace, made of marble as are door frames had quite a few chips out of it. Some damage by Americans when they used it after the war?
A private restaurant uses the space and the meeting room where we sat (for hot chocolate and cake) was capable of holding around 120 people. There is also another room that would seat about 50 that was also part of the restaurant. Apart from the views, there is not much else to see. On a nice day, it would be easy to spend a couple of hours there, but with the weather as it was and huge lumps of ice around the place it wasn't really a place to linger. As we'd had to nominate our bus time to return before we went into the tunnel, we didn't realise that, on a day like today, an hour or so would be enough.

When we did go back down, we went to the "Dokumentation Obersalzburg" museum. Now that was an experience. We only had one and a half hours there, but you would need at least twice that just to listen to the audio guide for the museum. We both found, after a while, that we just couldn't listen any more. We' d heard about how Hitler had orchestrated his campaign to appeal to the people and then started hearing about the changes he made to people's ways of life as he gradually assumed more and more power.
Thankfully, running out of time was a bonus, as we could see the pictures of all the things that happened next and didn't need to hear explanations of his progression to war, it was all too vivid. We have collected some pamphlets explaining some of the exhibits to read later.
When we went downstairs, we entered the actual bunkers underneath what was the guest house. The tunnels were well. - formed but unfinished in places, showing that it was well prepared to protect Hitler. It was an amazing experience to walk through this area seeing the setup of the rooms and their uses. Several of the houses that made up the Obersalzburg area were destroyed so that they wouldn't turn into shrines for Nazis and Neo Nazis. These included Hitler's house, the Burghof which is where many of the famous photos of Hitler an his cronies were taken before and during WW2.

We had lots to talk about as we enjoyed a local beer back in Inzell (visiting a German pub for the first time) before heading back to our accommodation. The beer was nice enough that we bought some to take away.