Europe Tour 2010

Day 5 		Thursday 24th June

After leaving the hotel in Salzburg, we travelled south to Hallein to visit a salt mine. There are several in the area as there are massive deposits of salt in the mountains around there. We visited Salzwelten at Bad Durrnberg. This claimed to be the first salt mine in the world and ceased production only in 1989. The celts first started to mine salt here about 2500 years ago and continued until Roman times. Then production stopped and only restarted in early medieval times. Production of salt under the patronage of the Prince Archbishops of Salzburg made the area very wealthy, at least for a few of the elite. Our tour lasted about 90 minutes and, dressed in white trousers and tops, included a train trip into and out of the mountain, a trip across a brine lake (made magical with cunning sound and light features), two exhilarating slides down wooden ramps, and several short movies to give information about the history and techniques of salt extraction.

After a visit to a reconstruction of a celtic village and a snack lunch we left Hallein to continue our journey south to Trieste. The scenery was tremendous during the trip. The mountains were jagged and rocky as the Ice Age glaciation did not reach this far south and we now understand exactly what Alpine meadows mean. The autobahn has made the journey easy. There are lots of tunnels (some 5 and 6 km long) and the gradients are fairly easy (for the goods traffic) so driving was quite pleasant. Traffic was fairly light most of the way. There were quite a few sets of road works, but were able to continue at 50 mph through most of them. Finding the hotel in Trieste proved most difficult, even with the help of maps, directions from garages and from a phone call to the hotel. 

Miles travelled today = 282					Trip miles total – 1115
(of which 30 were in tunnels)