Finally, I’m starting to post photos from the Alpine trip again. My goal is to be done by the time the one-year anniversary rolls around. Only four months to go (oh crap only four months until i’m 27.) and over 550 photos left to go through. *sigh*

Day 5 was my birthday, and at breakfast in Munich I was serenaded! We drove to Austria and stopped in Salzburg. It was chilly and rainy, but our walking tour was still really enjoyable. We saw the birthplaces of Mozart and Doppler and walked through the Mirabell Gardens. We saw an old cemetery at St. Peter’s Archabbey.

For lunch, I spotted a restaurant in the square across from Mozart’s birthplace called zum Eulenspiegel. The building itself is over 650 years old and it’s held the restaurant since 1713. Inside you walk up a narrow winding staircase and are seated in one of the smaller dining rooms. Ours overlooked the Salzach River from a wall that made up the archway to the square. Each room is themed and very cozy. It was an excellent birthday lunch and I highly recommend zum Eulenspiegel to anyone who is lucky enough to visit Salzburg.

When we were loading the bus to go on to Vienna, our tour director, DeeDee, had to go back to look for a few of our wayward companions. A police officer started giving us a hard time for staying the loading zone for so long and finally our driver had to…show the policeman some good will, as it were, and gave him a bottle of wine from a stash in the glove compartment. We were no longer bothered. Once we were on our way, DeeDee played the "The Sound of Music" soundtrack on the bus’s stereo.

In Vienna we made a brief stop at the hotel then drove to Grinzing, on the outskirts of town, for dinner and drinks at a heurigen wine bar. On the way we saw the Minopolis, the much reviled ‘golden cabbage’ the stadtgartendirektion and a swimming pool on a barge in the Danube canal.

At the wine bar, we were served a giant platter of various meats (including wienerschnitzel of course) and spatzle and…never-ending pitchers of wine. PITCHERS. OF. WINE. Um…things got a little crazy. There were these great musicians walking around playing music and taking requests and my mom and cousin got up and danced and got other people to dance and my mom sang like Louis Armstrong. And still the wine kept coming. Everyone sang ‘Happy Birthday’ for me and ‘Happy Anniversary’ for a couple in our tour and I got a birthday cake – the famous sacher torte! By 9pm everyone was feeling pretty good and soon the night was over, much to everyone’s chagrin.

Laura: It’s time to go??

Amy: Oh shit.

Also, when we were loading the bus to go to the hotel my mom commandeered the bus’s microphone to reprise her Louis Armstrong impression! I’m not sure how future birthdays will top this one.