Since being in Europe, I’ve really only been in cities. This is fine, I absolutely love being in the city — close to all the excitement. For our last weekend in Europe though, we decided to take a train to the Alps. Planning this last minute, we soon realized, was a bad idea. Salzburg was ideal, but everywhere in the city was already booked or way too expensive for only two nights. Megan poked online for a little bit and found the most amazing deal: a 7 person apartment for two nights for only 135 euro TOTAL. It was in the small “city” of Radstadt about an hour and a half outside of Salzburg. It all looked a little too good to be true, but we bought our tickets without making any other plans whatsoever. WHAT. SO. EVER.
We left at about 9:30 on Friday morning and I’ve decided I prefer the day train a million times over the night train. The Czech countryside is beautiful, and once we neared the Alps it only got better. After switching trains a couple of times, we made it to Radstadt about 8 hours later.
We had some vague directions on how to get to the apartment so we went on our way. It was a quiet little town right in the mountains. It was overcast, but the views just walking down the road were like nothing I’d ever seen before. We walked through an empty main square and down the road for a ways until we came across a field of mini ponies. (I may have thought they were goats at first glance). While gawking over the small herd of ponies, a man pulled up in a car next to us and asked if we spoke English. We did, and he said well then you’ve found where you’re staying! And it happened that we were standing right across the street from the apartment we were looking for (Haus Tomas).
*photo stolen from Megan’s FB. 🙂
Once again, the next set of events way too good to be true. The man who had called us over was Werner, and he introduced us to his wife, Maria. They were extremely friendly, and led us around the upstairs apartment and put our bags down. They insisted we join for a welcome drink downstairs– so we were all given a shot (or two) of apricot schnapps to have with them, introduced to their little son Matthias, and then talked for about a good hour.
They are both fascinating people and the most excellent company. They seemed so excited to have us there – showing us on the map where we should go hiking the next day and checking bus times with us. We talked about our travels and they told us about they had never heard of the Sound of Music until they were in their twenties. There would be an auction that night to sell the May Day pole that was positioned in the middle of town square (shown above). The tradition itself sounded hilarious (secretly cutting down a tree, hiding it, trying to keep it from being stolen? drinking a lot) but also really interesting and showed the closeness of the community there.
They gave us recommendations on where to eat down the road, so we walked a ways and tried about 5 places that were all closed until we got to the only restaurant that looked open. We got Kebabs and pizza and then decided to just go back to the house to relax and do whatever.
As we were going in the front door, Werner came around and told us they were having a bonfire out back and that we should join them. We had nothing else to do, so we all sat with them and a couple of their family friends for the rest of the night. They were the friendliest people we had interacted with for the last 7 weeks, offering us wine, whiskey, cigars and anything else we could want. Being around Czech people in the city for so long, we were a bit stunned by how nice these people were. We all talked till about midnight.. mostly about our travels, America, Austria, the May Day tree trunk tradition (still trying to wrap our heads around it– it’s also an awesome story) Europe in general, wild animals and the Roman Road(?). Although this would be my first night in a while not sleeping in the same bed as Megan, I managed to fall asleep the second my head hit the pillow.
*Photo stolen from from Joe’s fb.
A Place in Prague 