We arrived in Bad Gastein in the late afternoon after visiting Krimml waterfall earlier in the day.
We checked into our hotel first thing on our arrival. Then got our room situated and unpacked our luggage from the car before heading out to see the city.
The hotel was called Salzburger Hof and had all of these headshots on the walls of famous people that had stayed there in the past. We recognized a few of the faces.
I'm guessing that it had been a long time since any celebrity had stayed there though because to be honest, the hotel was starting to look a little tired and worn on the inside, especially in our rooms. I didn't bother to take any photos of them. Nonetheless, it was a nice place overall with decent service and we didn't have any complaints.
Something funny about the celeb photos was that they covered all of the walls throughout the hotel giving the impression that many many famous people had stayed there over the years. It didn't take me long though to see that many of the pictures were duplicates. It was like "that one looks familiar, I think I saw that same photo in another room." By the end of our stay I saw Nick Cages face in four different locations and realized that each photo was used at least three to four different times.
The hotel was up on a hill overlooking the city and I took some pictures
of it from where we parked our car.
The city is essentially built on a mountain and basically sprawls out across it.
With that in mind be prepared to do a lot of uphill and downhill walking during your visit.
Our hotel was at the top area and the main city center was at the bottom, so we got some really decent exercise just exploring the town.
It was practically a mini hike.
Bad Gastein is located to the East of Innsbruck, where we came from, and to the South of Salzburg.
On the map its about halfway between Innsbruck and Graz (give or take a little).
It's a resort town with a heavy ski culture which you notice right away when walking around town.
There are ski shops and cabin themed restaurants and signs and hotels that give off the ski chalet vibe.
The city itself is situated at the base of a ski hill as well.
There's actually a gondola cable car station to take you up the mountain located right in town near our hotel.
Winter must be their busy time of year I'm guessing which seemed apparent pretty early on during our stay.
Many of the shops and restaurants were closed for the summer and there weren't a lot of other people around.
That was kind of nice in a way but there were moments when I felt some ghost town-like vibes.
It was actually more of a problem at night around dinner time.
Many of the restaurants were closed so the dining options were very limited which meant that the few that were open were packed to the gills.
On our second night we started to worry a little that we wouldn't find any place to eat at all. In the end we did get a seat on a patio under the restaurant canopy.
It was lucky that we were covered under the canopy though because it started pouring down rain 20 minutes after we got the table.
Our dinner was pretty good that night as I recall. Anyone want to guess what my father in law ordered? That's right, schnitzel - both nights that we stayed. He would NOT let his guard down for the remainder of the trip.
If you haven't been following along this trip, you won't know what I'm talking about and thats fine. The just of it is, he only wanted to eat schnitzel our entire time in Austria and was upset about the one night he hadn't ordered it. The meal happened to be a Michelin star restaurants though so its hard for me to understand why he was disappointed...
Anyway, in keeping with the resort town theme there was also a large spa in town near the cable car station.
I think that it was the hot spring bath type but we didn't go and check it out.
It just wasn't on our itinerary this time around.
There was a zip line spanning the ravine in the center of the city as well, for the adventurous sorts.
The downtown area was quite nice with its Baroque style buildings.
Much of it was under construction during our visit as seen by the many cranes perched across the mountain.
The best feature of Bad Gastein in my opinion was its waterfall.
I believe that it's called the Gasteiner. It runs directly through the center of the city and is a pretty amazing natural water feature.
It wasn't just a stream either, it was a decent sized waterfall with some serious flow and power behind it.
A bridge spans the falls so you can view it from both sides.
The bridge was a pretty awesome spot to look out over the rest of the city.
I took quite a few photos there on the different days that we stayed.
My wife...So much attitude
The water continues on and can be viewed from another location a little further down the mountain.
There are some restaurants and bars down there next to the water with a view of the falls from their patio terraces.
We stayed two nights in Bad Gastein and really enjoyed our time there. A lot of the shops and restaurants were closed during our visit in the summer and though the city seemed to be more focused on skiing and winter sports, we still found there to be a lot to do in the area. There was some great hiking in the mountains surrounding the city and we thought that the town was beautiful in the natural setting. I'll talk a little more about our hikes in a later post but for now I can say that Bad Gastein is a great little resort town worth checking out. I hope that you get to see it one day.
