Outside My Southern Comfort Zone

Back to the salt mines.......literally!

4/21/2018

Originally published 11 June 2013

The gang headed into the salt mines

It was wet, rainy, and drizzly. The mountains were fogged in....so Eagle's nest wasn't going to happen this morning. We decided instead to go to the salt mines! While this sounds odd....it was great fun! We donned coveralls, and entered an actual working salt mine, in operation since.....somewhere around 1200.

On the slide in the salt mines

We rode in on a train, similar to what we call a man trip in the coal mines. When deep inside the mines, there were displays and an audio guide. The tour was in German, but the audio guide was in English, so we got along quite well. We were led on this tour by a young German guy. During one of our breaks, I talked with him a while............and it turns out his English was perfect. He told me he had lived in Australia for the last 11 months and wanted to move to the U.S., either in Florida or in San Diego. It turns out...he's a surfer!

Jenner Mountain

The tour led us through all the stages of mining salt, and included a boat ride on a brine lake. The coolest thing was traveling between the levels. The miners, for hundreds of years, have used two logs, assembled together as a sliding board type device. It is a very efficient way to travel from level to level. Sadly, they didn't allow pictures inside the mine, or we would have many more!

Lake Konigsee

We left the salt mine and went to the bunker/documentation center at Ober Salzburg. Laurie and I had done this before but David and Sheree had not. Eagle's nest was still fogged in so we went to Konigsee instead.

Electric boats on Konigsee

While at Konigsee, we walked around the lake, and visited an actual bobsled track! It wasn't in operation, but it allowed an up close look at how a bobsled track actually works and what it looks like. The whole operation is smaller than I expected, but compact and very efficient. It's basically a roller coaster you get to steer. It uses gravity to stop the sled much more than I thought it would, with the last turn and straight away actually running uphill.

Bobsled track

After bobsleds and Konigsee, we headed back to town, took a rest at the hotel for a while, then wandered the town. We capped the day with a very nice Italian dinner before heading back to the room.