Innsbruck (Weekend Part 3)

After spending Sunday in Salzburg, Liz and I took the train to Innsbruck which is just under 2 hours away and further into the mountains.

Helpful map on the train to show us how far we had gone.

The weather in Innsbruck was a bit crazy, one minute it was warm and bright and sunny, and the next minute dark clouds would come over and it might even rain a bit, before the sun came back out.  Looking through my pictures it is amazing how different the sky looks in two pictures taken only a few minutes apart.  We had instructions from the place where we were staying to take the bus from the train station to the hotel, so we were assuming it would be like in Salzburg where it was just the normal city bus...it makes a few stops along the way and then we get there.  Little did we know, our hotel is up on the side of the mountain just outside of Innsbruck itself, so our bus quickly wound up and up. 

Our lodging for the night.  Really more like a B&B type place, although no front desk or anything, we had to use our room key to open the front door.

and not exactly made for tall people like us...

We got all checked in to our place and hadn't had lunch yet, so we asked about when the bus would be going back down into Innsbruck.  The guy checked the schedule and said..."well...you just missed it...so...2 hours".  So we asked him where we might find food that we could walk to (our hotel place has a restaurant in it, but it is closed on Mondays), he suggested the next Gasthaus up the road, so we carefully made our way up there for lunch.  He actually suggested we "walk through the fields" which we tried for a bit, but the river you see below is in a fairly deep ravine, and we weren't sure how exactly to cross it without using the bridge on the road, so we stuck to the pavement as much as possible.

The view from our outdoor table on the terrace at the Gasthaus...not too shabby.

The view the other way.

We successfully caught the bus on it's way back into town and decided we'd hang around there for the rest of the evening.  The last bus up the hill was 7:30pm, but we were told that we wouldn't have trouble catching a cab at the train station to bring us back up...not exactly the case...but we did make it home.

We wandered around through a lot of the old part of town, stopping in the few shops that were open on the holiday, and walking around to some churches and into the gardens.  There was only one major rain shower despite the thick dark clouds.  And that one ended with a big rainbow!

For dinner we decided to go to a beer garden type place that had plenty of tables outside for us to sit, and thankfully these were under giant umbrellas to protect us from any other passing showers.  We were able to sit and people watch and enjoy good food for several hours.  We ordered a "Tyrolean snack platter" for dinner, full of all sorts of yummy local specialties. 

After finally convincing a cab to take us back home, we did make it, and had a lovely breakfast up there the next morning.  We went back into town on the bus and dropped our bags in a locker at the train station before heading to the base of one of the mountains that allows you to go to the top via a funicular and two cable cars. 

We went all the way from the very bottom to the very top

The funicular that took us part of the way

The view of the city from the first stop

Looking up towards where we are headed (up in the clouds)

The first (and larger) of the two cable cars to take you further up the mountain.  This one says it will hold about 95 people, although I certainly wouldn't want to be on it with that many

Rising through the clouds

The view from the second stop.  This is where you change to another cable car.

Lots of snow!

From here we went up again, almost to the very top (you can walk about 15 minutes to the summit from where the cable car ends)

Also joining us at the top were some Alpine sheep of some kind...the two videos below are of the sheep mostly, although one gives you a bit of a panoramic view of where we are.

Looking down the other side of the summit 

Once we wandered around at the top for a while, we needed to start making our way down so that we wouldn't get back home super late.  Since it was now Tuesday and no longer a holiday, we were able to try one of the restaurants recommended to us by someone we met in Salzburg who is currently living in Innsbruck, and we were certainly not disappointed.  We had really good pizza, one with cooked spinach and gorgonzola and one with asparagus and ham and a hollandaise sauce drizzled on top.  I will hopefully at some point write an entire post about "Spargel Season" here and what exactly that means, since I'm not sure I've seen anything quite like it. 

After pizza it was back to the train station to collect our bags and head back on the train to Vienna.  Such a fantastic weekend running all around and getting to see so many different places in such a short period of time.  I will for sure be making other visits to all of these places, and thankfully none of them are very difficult to get to!