The weather today in Zell Am See is rainy, damp, and chilly but as Christina so eloquently put it, “The rain is really crappy but it makes it more authentic.”  We slept in quite a bit this morning (Christina obviously loved it!) probably due to the late (our time) calls home via Skype.  Never really had much use for Skype before but it’s pretty handy here in Europe!  Anyway…

They actually held our breakfast for us and so we ate a late breakfast though, honestly, it was really lunch.  Not only that, it was a superb breakfast!  Croissants, bread, apple pastries, fruit, 3 types of meat, 4 different cereals, 5 different spreads, 3 flavors of yogurt…. All on a cart for just us.  Did I mention it was complimentary?  Seriously, we are living the good life here in Austria!

After that, we came back to the room for a moment to upload some photos.  I guess I had forgotten photos on my camera so I uploaded some photos from our Charlottesville trip and my moms birthday back in February as well the photos from Wiesbaden, Frankfurt, and Bern.  

After that, we finally wandered down to the town.  And down is the key word! We aren’t that far from the town horizontally but we are well above it.  So the 20 minute walk down the path was pretty pleasant.  The hike back, not so much!  The town is very nice and the people are even nicer.  We even found a small English section in one of the bookstores.  We wandered the town and Christina quickly found something to spend our Euros on in a sporting goods store.  We had lunch in a cafe but the kitchen was closed and we could only order drinks and toast (which turned out to be paninis).  Our mishap of the day was when Christina discovered parma doesn’t mean parmigiano  cheese but prosciutto ham .  

We started to walk around Zeller See, the lake which Zell Am See resides on, but by then Christina and I were ready to go back up to the room and relax for awhile before dinner.  Plus, the rain hadn’t really stopped all day and we were a bit rained-out.  We didn’t have any trouble finding our way back up to the hotel but that doesn’t mean it was easy — that 20m walk down the mountain is, not surprisingly, a much longer and tiring walk back up!  

For now, I’m uploading more pictures from our day’s activity and we’re just enjoying our wonderful room.  All of the photos from the trip can be found here.  Here’s a view from our room over the town:

And the view from the road back up to our hotel!