The hills are alive...

Our stay in Austria has been absolutely fantastic. After our rough start in London, we've had a great time traveling through the lake district of Austria. We left Salzburg and headed to a small picturesque village called Hallstatt. It is built into the mountainside and faces Hallstatt lake. You can't take a train there, because there simply aren't tunnels through the mountains, so we had to take a train to the other side of the lake and take a ferry across the water. The town was soo tiny, but beautiful. I don't speak a lick of German, which poses a problem getting around town, but our phrasebook got us a room for the night at a nice B&B with a fantastic hostess. She was so helpful and thankfully spoke English. They have one grocery store in town... which was closed, one tourist center... which was closed, and a few restaurants... which were closed for the 'Festival' (more on that later). It was at that point that Kary and I vowed never to travel without snacks for fear of falling over in hunger. Thankfully we found one restaurant open that night and quickly agreed that that was the only way to get fed. The weather was so beautiful, and we walked up and down the waterfront just gazing at the stars after dinner. The sky was so clear and the stars so bright that the only way you could tell where the sky ended and the mountains began was when the stars stopped shining. It was chilly by the time we climbed the steps to our B&B for the night, and we could see our faint breaths rise into the crisp Austrian air.
In the morning, we took one last stroll through town and then boarded the ferry boat to the other side of the lake. As we pushed away from the dock, I took a few pictures of the homes built into the rocks, the famous churches, and the town that is totally nestled in the valley of the Austrian mountains. During the two minute ferry ride to the other side of the mountain, all of the church bells from town began to ring ten o'clock, and their sounds echoed through the valley and the lake and the mountains and I finally got it... 'The hills are alive.'















The town of Hallstatt