Yesterday, Dave and I ventured up to Hohensalzburg, the old fortress above the city. It was high. It was fortressy. It was largely satisfying, except that we made the error of forking over 3 euros for entrance into the “Marionetten Museum”, which consisted of two small rooms worth of contemporary puppets. For those of you who are playing along at home, that’s somewhere in the vicinity of 1.50 per small room, or about 0.30 per contemporary puppet. Not the best value we’ve encountered on our vacation.

Today, we had much better luck at the Salt Mine!!! There were miner coveralls that made me look like Dopey! There was a swift train through a small dark tunnel! There was a really long wooden slide! There was a movie about salt mining! There were fragments of the really old wooden pipes that were used to transfer the salt water! There was another even steeper and longer wooden slide! There was a raft ride across an underground salt lake with 220m of mountain above it and lights all around! There was a great big almost-200-year old brass pump that pulled salt water to the top of the mountain! There was another train ride! There was a third train ride! There were teeny shakers of salt! It was like Disneyworld for geeks!!!

There was also another family from Cupertino. Is anybody left in Cupertino, or have its residents all relocated to Europe?

(By the way, Dave and I are unable to corroborate the “posterior effects” that Tony experienced on the two wooden slides. Either we were spared because he kindly advised us to wear jeans, or his tour group worked out the last few splinters for us.)

Tomorrow night, we’re going to be staying in Munich again. Friday morning, we’ll wake up in Munich and will have to find our way to Llangollen (in Wales) by nightfall. This is a process that takes a shuttle, a plane flight, a train ride, an Underground trip, and then 3 more train rides. “Miles to go before I sleep” and all that. Something tells me we’re going to have some difficulty finding internet access in Deepest Wales, so you may next hear from me in Edinburgh in a couple of days.