Salzburg
One of the main reasons my Europe posts have been taking so long to post is because I've been having major computer issues. My laptop crashed and I had to go the Apple store and spend hours trying to have them fix it, then the computer guy just wound up wiping the whole hard drive and it's been insanely stressful and awful... Well I thought I'd backed up everything successfully but unfortunately a lot of my photos from Europe were corrupted. So I've had to spend more hours trying to sift through and fix all of the problems. It came to my attention, though, that I lost every single photo that I took in Salzburg. They have been wiped, they are gone, and yes I cried and yes I'm still in mourning. There were some beautiful photos that I will never recover. And for anyone that knows me, I really don't enjoy an experience unless I can get great photos, so this is a huge disappointment. But I guess I'll just have to go back to Salzburg and make some more memories someday. The few photos the survived were saved in a separate edits folder, saved on my phone, or screenshots from my Lightroom catalog (so some are really bad quality and the screenshots are unedited), but I'm sure you'll be able to tell from these few shots how incredibly beautiful Salzburg and the surrounding region are. I only wish I could show you all the photos I'd taken...
The night we arrived in Salzburg following our stop in Hallstatt, we ate dinner at the oldest restaurant in Europe (over 1100 years old) called St. Peter Stiftskeller. The food and wine were good, but the experience was marred by the some of the slowest service you've ever dealt with. It took an hour between the appetizer and the entree... So as cool as the place was for its history and ambience, it was a bit of a let down for service. The next day, for our day touring around Salzburg, we started the morning on a private "Sound of Music tour" that took us around the sites seen and used in the movie and the lake region surrounding the city. It was so beautiful and Austria is very officially one of my favorite countries ever, but lo and behold I got car sick on the twisty mountain roads so I had to push through the nausea to take in the scenery but by the end of the morning wasn't feeling great. So we went back to the hotel to rest awhile (we were staying at the Sacher hotel again, another branch of the Sacher in Vienna), before walking around exploring Salzburg. We walked through the gorgeous Mirabellgarten across from our hotel then crossed the river into the walled old town, where we shopped in some of the gorgeous boutiques, stopped for late lunch at a small Austrian restaurant, and took the funicular to the castle at the top of the hill overlooking the town (where I got some amazing photos that are now lost forever). It started raining though, so we hurried back to the hotel to get ready for dinner. For dinner, we had an interesting experience at a farm house restaurant some ways outside of town called Pfefferschiff -- delicious local food and a very quaint little setting, though it was so hot inside the restaurant that I had to step outside into the drizzling rain at one point just for some relief. But the wine was good and the food was good, too, so all in all a good meal despite the fact that I could not for the life of me pronounce the name of the restaurant. Salzburg was such a beautiful little city, a sort of miniature of everything I love so much about Vienna. Great food, good shopping, chic local charm, and beautiful scenery -- definitely another check off on my love for Austria (is Austriaphilia a thing?).
So I'm very disappointed that I lost all of my photos, but at least I had a great experience to look back on, right?