My wife and I don't do many excursions when we go on vacation, aside from maybe popping into a castle or museum or something for a brief visit during the day. We had never done any sort of official tour though, or anything like that on our previous trips. We had always just done self guided walking tours to predetermined stops that I had researched online in advance. It had always worked out fine and, generally speaking, we never felt that we had missed out on anything.
Our trip to Austria ended up being a little different though. Since we were travelling with my wifes parents we decided to book one of those fancy tours that take you to a bunch of interesting places and give you all sorts of information on them along the way. It ended up being a lot of fun as a one off activity and a really great way to spend the day seeing things that we may not have seen otherwise.
For this post I'm going to do something a little different and talk about the tour experience and give you a brief high-level look at the sites that we visited. I want to show that we did all of these things in a single day and talk a little about the pros and cons of taking an official tour. In later posts I'll actually focus on the stops themselves and give more info on the specific locations. But thats enough mid-post preamble, let me tell you about the tour.
The tour that we took was the "Supersaver Bavarian Alps - Tour 3+3A+4" with Panoramic Tours. I have no idea what all of the numbers at the end mean other than there were 3 destinations with an additional stop in a town, which technically makes it 4 stops all together. I'm not sure what the other 3 represents but it makes it look a little more complicated than it actually is.
The tour started with an early morning pick up in Salzburg and then we took a bus across the border to Germany to see the Kehlsteinhaus, also known as Hitlers "Eagles Nest," the Salzburg salt mine, Kings Lake, and finally, the town of Berchtesgaden Germany, where all of these sites are essentially located. The tour was 9 hours altogether so pretty much a full day and was non-stop, go-go-go, the entire time.
There were two stops at the town of Berchtesgaden that were just long enough to grab a quick lunch and then a midday snack and a beer later.
Lunch wasn't provided by the tour but they scheduled time for it throughout the day.
We had a little bit of time left over to see the town itself too, but only because it was a small town and there wasn't much to see.
The price of the tour was around €140 (give or take a few shekels). It wasn't cheap but also felt pretty reasonable considering how much we did that day. The tour was in English and there were options for other languages as well. The tour guide was personable and knowledgeable and provided a lot of information about the sites during the bus ride. He also managed our time and kept everything and everyone on schedule. It all moved pretty efficiently, like German Clockwork really.
The first stop of the day was at the Kehlsteinhaus. I should mention that you don't actually have to take an official tour in order to visit any of the sites but there are definitely some advantages of doing so. For instance, we got a lot of priority access that day and our group got to cut the long line up of people waiting for a bus to take them up the mountain to see the Eagles Nest. That saved us a lot of time and annoyance. We also got to cut the line again once we arrived at the site. Basically there was no waiting around in line at all.
The negative of taking a tour though is that we only got to stay at each site for a brief amount of time. For instance at Kehlsteinhaus we only got to walk around up there for 45 minutes. I personally didn't feel that that was enough and could have used another 30 minutes easily. The short timeframes allowed us to see a lot of different sites in just one day though. So there is good and bad to a tour and I guess it just depends on what you value more. Would you rather see more places briefly or just one or two for longer time periods? That's the question you would have to ask yourself in trying to decide.
The Saltmine was probably the least memorable of the locations for me and if I had to drop one of the stops that day it would have been that one. That's a personal preference though and doesn't necessarily reflect on the location itself. They didn't allow us to take photos inside the mine so I have no pictures to show you other than this funny one of us getting ready to go inside.
Notice my strangely long neck and how my wife looks like she belongs in a K-pop band. I removed my mother in laws face because I don't know is she would want her photo on my blog, but I drew in her expression exactly to match that of the actual photo. I don't think that she wanted her picture taken in that moment. The lack of photos that day could be partly why I remember this stop the least. I took this one off the Salzburg Saltmine Website just to give you an idea of it.
I recall that the information about the mine was quite interesting but we didn't actually see any salt in there so it was very similar to doing a standard cave tour. If you have ever been into a cave or mine then you can basically imagine what this location is like.
Kings Lake was a very picturesque location but it was also very rushed. We didn't get much time here either. I think we spent just 60 minutes there.
It was basically just long enough to race over the the main lookout spot, take a photo and then race back to the bus.
There were a bunch of shops in the area around the lake so you could go a little slower and just hang out there to not be so rushed. But the view at the look out was quite nice and I thought it was worth seeing it, if only briefly.
So that is a high level look at our tour with Panoramic Tours. As you can see we did a lot of stuff in only one day so it was definitely a good way to see a lot in just a short amount of time. There was no way that we could have seen so many places otherwise. In the end it came down to a question of quantity over quality so keep that in mind if you ever book something similar for yourself. It's a great way to see a lot in a short amount of time but you really end up sacrificing a little on the quality side of the experience.
Overall I really enjoyed it and would probably do it again, maybe for one day of a long vacation.