The Scroop's European Holiday: Salzburg -Lauterbrunnen

Today we leave Salzburg for Lauterbrunnen and with most of the packing done last night it's a fairly low stress morning. We leave our apartment around 8:45 and decide to walk to the train station. The taxi drive from the train station to our apartment when we arrived took 20 minutes and cost us €10. The walk to the train station ends up only taking us 20 minutes so figure that one out! Last night when I checked the tickets and our seat reservation, something wasn't adding up. The seat numbers didn't quite match the seating plan I had printed off and highlighted. We check our tickets and realize that both the tickets and the seating reservations say "First Class". This is weird because this is one of our longest journeys (9 hours) and it is also one of the cheaper fares. In actual fact the kids tickets have €0.00 printed on them so it looks like they were free. We make our way to our platform and the train arrives on time. We jump on the carriage with all the posh people and make our way to our seats and a business type gent is occupying all 4 of our seats. Here we go, I'm thinking and I excuse myself half expecting a debate to start and he says "Am I in your seat"? That's the signal that lets me know I have the correct seats and I can tell him to get out. We sit down but something still doesn't feel right. Along comes the ticket inspector to check our tickets. The tickets have been printed from my home computer so they are just 4 sheets of A4 paper. He starts looking at them quizzically and he says in his little Austrian accent "you are one ticket short, can I please see identification". Kris and I look at each other a bit stressed at this point so I grab the tickets back off him but as it turned out, two of the tickets were just sort of stuck together. I give the, back to him and he says "Agh, thank you, have a nice day" and continues on. I am not sure what I did when I booked these tickets but it seems we got a pretty good deal. The weather is still very overcast and there is a lot of low lying cloud so the stretch from Salzburg to Innsbruck is relatively boring. However, once we leave Innsbruck the clouds are much higher and the train is cutting a path through soaring mountains. The views are insane and the train also runs along a river where we can see a bunch of white water rafters. The train we are on is called the RailJet but I reckon it should be called the RailSnail because its only averaging about 100km/h. Its actually quite nice though because it gives you time to look around and things aren't buzzing by at a rate of knots. The only thing that ruined it was this screaming child that just wouldn't shut up. It pretty much screamed the entire time it was on the train which was about 4 hours, even the kids were getting frustrated and they had their headphones on full blast! The thought of jumping off the train did come to mind but it probably wasn't go fast enough to kill me. The train arrives at Zurich for the first of our three connecting trains for today. We have 12 minutes to change trains which is the most we will get today. We have become experts at changing trains and we know exactly what to do. We make our way to the train doors 10 minutes before arrival. If you don't, you well get caught in the crowd of people trying to get off and waste precious minutes. When the train stops you open the door, jump off and look both ways to see which way is the exit. Once you know which way to go you walk fast or run, depending on how many minutes the change over is. Once you get to the end of the platform you look at the big electronic board and try and work out which train is yours and which platform it's on. Once this has been worked out you look and around for the platform and get there as quick as you can. This changeover is a fairly easy one and we make our connecting train with heaps of time to spare. The next leg was only 1 hour long where we changeover again in Bern. This proves a little more hectic as we only have 6 minutes to change over and the train has arrived 2 minutes late. We jump off the train and run like hell to the board to check the platform number. We spot the platform number and run like hell again. We manage to get on as the doors were beeping to shut. That was close. The next leg is only 1 hour again to Interlaken. This ride from Bern to interlaken is a cracker. It hugs lake Thun all the way to Interlaken and the scenery is incredible. The Interlaken station is a lot smaller and the train arrives a little bit early so we have heaps of time to make the train to Lauterbrunnen. This is also an amazing ride with more incredible scenery. We arrive in Lauterbrunnen around 6pm and we are tired. It's been a long day and we have been moving since 8:45. We have a short work up the hill to the Oberland Hotel where we are met by the owner. She is lovely and shows us to our apartment which is in the next building alongside the hotel. The apartment is huge and has a large balcony overlooking the main street. Being a Sunday night, everything is shut including the local Coop supermarket so we make a reservation in the hotel restaurant. We showered up and headed down to the restaurant for some very cheesy Swiss food. The food was lovely but one of the memories we have of Switzerland is that everything here is expensive and our dinner was no exception. As lovely as it was, we will be having dinner on the balcony tomorrow night!