No matter how much time I spend planning & budgeting, our trips always seem to wander off track, which I’m totally fine with because it matches our travel style. Our recent trip to Germany & Austria, however, was a unique divergence…we blew our budget on PASTRIES!
Our last full day in Obertraun began with lots of rain, so hiking was out of the question. Lucky for us, there were lovely towns all around us for the picking & at our innkeeper’s suggestion we visited Bad Ischl & Bad Goisern.
In German, bad means bath so if you see it before a town name it’s safe to assume it’s a spa town & will either have hot springs or mineral water lakes nearby. In other words, you should visit.
Bad Ischl was the largest town in the region. It was only a 30min train ride from Obertraun & SOOO worth the trip! The Traun River meandered beautifully through town & there were several good shopping options. We tried our first Berliner (German version of a donut filled with fruit jam or chocolate & dusted with powdered sugar). Mmmmm…
There are some places that just have to be seen in person to be believed. Gosausee Austria is one of them.
Day 6 of our two week sojourn in Austria & Germany gave us one of the prettiest hikes we’ve experienced so far. Having spent the previous day on an easy hike & lounging around, we were ready for something a little more challenging (but not TOO challenging as I wasn’t sure how my knee would hold up). Our innkeeper Larry swore that Gosausee was one of the prettiest hikes in the region, with a breathtaking view at the midpoint of the loop. Trusting Larry’s sage advice, we sprinted downhill to catch the “5 past 9 bus.” Larry told us everything we’d need to know about what bus to take & when to hop off & get on another one, so it was fairly easy. What took us by surprise was that we were the only non-Chinese people on the bus. Seeing that one of the couples was staying at the same inn as us, we attempted a stilted conversation & that’s how we found out that it was a national Chinese 10-day holiday. The nearby town of Hallstatt is a Unesco World Heritage site, so it’s very attractive to Chinese tourists who like to check off that “I’ve been here” list. Hence why we heard more Mandarin that day than German.