We decided to take a bit of a trip today into the Bavarian Alps. After about an hour on the train, we arrived in the lovely little town of Berchtesgaden, which was absolutely covered in snow and oh-so-picturesque. It was about a 20 minute walk around to where the salt mine tours are run from. Having not really hear much about them, i wasnt sure what to expect. First you put on a stunningly attractive set of overalls. They take you down into the first level of the mines (they go down about 4 levels, and end up hundreds of metres under the ground), and take you through an interactive tour of how the mine is run and how the salt is actually extracted. I must say it was very enlightening. They drill holes down hundreds ... read more

Since we had purchased our card, today was a day to visit every museum we could pack into the day (however some of them are lazy and dont open on Mondays, so we couldnt go to them all). We started off bz taking a funicular (cable car sort of thingee) up to the fortress on top of the hill. The view from the top was a-ma-zing, we ended up taking about a million and five photos (which i am sure we will bore you all with when we get back). We had another beautifully sunny day, so we could see for miles (its been far warmer here than either France or England). The interior of some of the fortress has been turned into a museum, and we did a little bit of a tour of some ... read more

Trains, trains, trains. Thats about all we did today. We jumped on the train early for 8-9 hours travelling to get to Salzberg. Lucky the countryside is so lovely that it gave us plenty to look at (we passed quickly through Strasbourg, where we are booked to stay for Xmas, and are very happy with our choice, it looks lovely). We saw a bit of snow on the way, mum got very excited. :) We had to change trains in Stuttgart, and had a couple of hours wait, so we lockered our bags and went to have a look at their Christmas market. I have never seen so many people before in my life, i think it was even worse than Paris. Being a Saturday afternoon, i think the entire city (and their dogs) was there. ... read more

We read about a Cathedral that topped Notre Dame and is the biggest in France, we decided to head off for a day in Amiens (even though neither of us had ever heard of it and still cant pronounce it). Our Europass train ticket has been fantastic for just jumping on trains and heading off wherever we want to go, whenever we want. It took a little getting to, about an hour on a train and then another half an hour on a bus (a flash TGV bus though, so it wasnt exactly a hardship). Our first stop was to check out this cathedral, which was worth the trip alone and was truly impressive. The front face was absolutely covered with carved figures and took years to complete. Would recommend a trip to anyone to see ... read more

Lille was the first place that we went to visit outside of Paris, since we thought we had better start to get some more use of our train tickets. The resort has a free bus that takes you to the local train station, so that was handy. After wandering around for a while in the wrong direction, we finally located the town to have a look at. After that we stumbled across all sorts of interesting churches and buildings on our way around. And the Christmas market was well worth all the effort, they really went all out with decorating the whole area and Mum wanted to take half the town home. After doing the Christmas market we then went to the ginourmous Eurolille, their monster shopping centre that they advertise everywhere. This was pretty impressive, ... read more