Today was our last day of the trip before traveling home and we had a free day. The entire group decided we wanted to go to Salzburg which is a city in Austria. It was our first time traveling without our professor or any of the German students so, with our luck, we ran into many traveling issues. To get to Salzburg we needed to take a train to Munich and then another to Salzburg. Our train to Munich was delayed 60 minutes! This meant we were going to miss our connecting train, however, we noticed another train at a different platform about to leave for Munich so we all sprinted over and made it to the train right on time. Then we got on our connecting train to Munich and they were having technical issues so once again our train was delayed another 30 mins.

Finally, we arrived and got through the troubles, so it was time to have fun. It was a beautiful day and probably one of the hottest days. We started by getting lunch at a fancy restaurant. I got an Austrian beef burger and it was really good. Then we went to a beautiful palace. There were incredible gardens and fountains. It was fancy and I felt like I was in a Disney movie. I even found a really large fountain big enough for me to skip my perfect skipping rock! Unfortunately, there were many people taking pictures and looking at the fountain so I folded under pressure. When I went to skip the rock I lost my form and then “plop” it sunk right into the water, but it is okay because my rock got to travel to another country with me.

Next, we moved on to the fortress. Without realizing it we walked across the whole city to get there. We made a few stops to go shopping, and get ice cream and coffee. We also passed Mozart’s house on the way. There were many more large buildings and fountains with amazing architecture that we passed on the way to the fort, but we finally arrived. We had to take a car up a steep incline to get to the top. Once we were there the view was amazing! You could see the whole city!

Then we walked around the fortress for a while. There were multiple museums with history about WWI which is what the fortress was used for. There was also a tower where you could take stairs to get to the highest point of the fort. This was really cool because you could look all around the city at the top. After about an hour of exploring the fortress, we took the tram back down and headed to the train station.

Once again, with our luck, the train was delayed because we had to stop once we crossed the border. German police got on the train and checked all our information. We are not exactly sure why the police got on, but there were no problems with our group. However, at this point, we were going to miss our connecting train home. Fortunately, when we got to Munich we found another train that had added a stop to Augsburg for the people who were on our train. I think it was a bullet train because we got to Augsburg in about 40 mins when it usually takes over an hour. We ended up getting to Augsburg earlier than our original train would have been!

I finished off the night by packing and getting ready to go home. It was a long crazy day but we made it back all by ourselves!