Taunted in Tantalizing Thalgau

Editor's note: I didn't take this photo of Thalgau (it was 40 degrees with no sign of snow when we were there), but our guest house is the building next to the church; you can see our room on the second level closest to the bell tower.

From Passau, the roads turned against us.

Austria, while mostly beautiful with Alps punching up through its geography, is not friendly to the driver to strays from the Autobahn. The German and even Czech roads spoiled us with their relative ease to navigate (they didn't overdo it with the traffic circles).

It's a land of major non-highway routes turning at traffic circles and tiny, indecipherable road signs. Tempers were rising as we left Passau, and for the first time I entered the fray between man and wife in the front seat: We were lost, so another voice couldn't hurt. Much.

After attempting to follow the mountain roads through to Salzburg - the highway was not a direct route - we looped back around to the same highway we left an hour before. Road signs with tiny script and traffic circles led us around by the nose. Bickering was our language without borders for many a kilometer.

The sun was gone and the question became whether to press onto Salzburg for lodging or stop just shy and wait until morning. Our able and exhausted driver and his wife picked an exit just short of Salzburg; he got caught in a round-about at the bottom of the ramp and ended up back on the highway headed away from Salzburg.

We fared better at the next exit, which brought us into Thalgau, a little town with a soaring church and three guesthouses right on the main square. We found our spot on the third try and quickly settled in.

After we planned our morning in Salzburg, Mitzy chose to take the night off and relax, Hannah went down to the bar for an apple juice while Chris and I took a brief walk through Thalgau I don't think there was any other type, but it was a nice gasp of fresh air along the canal feeding water to the town).

We passed Hannah using her German language skills with the villagers, and grabbed a booth, where I repeatedly assured Chris I had one beer in me before I adjourned upstairs for a shower.

First asking for light (hell) lager, but I switched up to see if the bartender could recommend something good and local. Calling it the “best beer,” he handed us two old-style capped bottles which just said, “Weisse Bier.”

If it were a bad beer, one could have sufficed.

Unfortunately, the Salzburger Weisse Bier was the single-best wheat beer I tasted, or may ever taste. Sorry Celis White and American imitators requiring an orange or lemon slice to be palatable, the Salzburger was the champ.

We had no choice but to clear away three more half-liter bottles.

Die Katze aus Thalgau

I must mention the third weary face at our booth. When we inquired about rooms earlier, a furry Siamese with floor-scraping belly walked up to us, fell on its side and purred as we scratched him heartily.
As Chris and I worked our way through those glorious wheat beers, he hopped up next to me, demanding another round of knuckle rubs between his ears. He purred again, unleashed a few hoarse meows then curled next to me tightly to purr him/herself to sleep. Chris had to grab the next few beers, since I wasn't about to move and disturb my new friend.

The entire time we sat, the cat nestled up against me and moved only to stretch then curl into a new pose.

Try finding that at an American hotel.

Thalgau Revelers
Across from us, at the largest table in the tavern, I watched an unusual collection of local men – from their 20s to their 70s, it was a diversely aged crew with one member in a wheelchair. They smoked, shouted “Prost” to glass after glass and chatted away in a German dialect far thicker than anything we encountered yet.

The group began breaking up around the time we decided to join Hannah at the beer and finish off the night with a Stiegl, the Austrian lager on the guesthouse sign. The remnants of the party made their way to the bar and tried conversing with us. I got out our names, one of the three men their Joseph (we'll call him Handlebar because of his mustache) rattled off a string of questions that I had no chance of translating in my head, and we were lost forever.

His face reeled in disappointment when I told him I couldn't understand, that I only spoke the most basic German. Next to Hannah, we were a huge letdown. I couldn't blame him; in Zwiesel, I understood almost everything said, but in Thalgau, I was out of ammo.

One of Josephs (Pale Blue, we'll call him, for his eyes) told us in 1974, he took a motorcycle across U.S. 66 to the Grand Canyon – I wasn't sure how he got there until he added some sound effects. Even that was awkward.

Aside from snapping a picture, the third Joseph said the least, occasionally looking over to my quiet companion who spoke not a phrase of German and asking, “Was ist los, Kristoff?” (What's the matter?).

Gradually they all left, and the cute-in-a-German-way bartender looked shocked when I left a one Euro tip on the bar.

When we retired for the evening and cracked a window, we heard some of the bar crowd walking home laughing. Chris said he though he heard our names in that conversation. I confirmed that: Willy and Kristoff were definitely still on their minds.

But the funnier thing was I had too good a time in the tavern to care about the impression we left on the regulars.



(Tomorrow: 90 minutes in Salzburg)