Bernadette is REALLY looking forward to the three-lake boat tour we have heard about, and is game to see the world-famous salt mine you enter from the top of a funicular at the edge of town. We pack the car and take meandering roads along scenic lakeshores and arrive in Hallstatt where parking is at enough of a premium that the “P-1” edge-of-town lot our hotel told us would have our space has a digital sign saying “Spaces – 0”.

We drive in anyway and wait about 10 minutes until someone leaves; call the Brau Gasthof shuttle driver; wait a bit; and cram into a van with one bag apiece and are driven down the city’s lakeside promenade, the swarms of tourists literally parting like broods of ducklings in front of a boat.

The first thing we learn is that the three-lake tour is for different lakes in a different town. The second thing we learn, after walking back toward the parking lot, is that the funicular to the salt mine entrance is under renovation until July. We are too knackered to find a bus and make an alternative effort, so … we rent a small electric boat with a lovely awning and go tooling along the lakeshore for an hour.

It is sublime: the weather, the light breeze, the “openness” of being away from crowds and out on the water. The castle and attached houses on the shore across the lake are owned by a butcher, who fixed them up. He stays in one of the small houses and the castle, apparently, is something he just shows to friends. Fun fact: Alexander Von Humboldt called Hallstatt “the loveliest lake village in the world.”

We dock and walk past our hotel toward the main square, above which the Catholic Church with its campinale-like bell tower lord it over the village.

We hit a very swanky lakeside terrace for Negronis and drinks and walk back to our hotel, right on the lakeside promenade, to spruce up from a day of travel and get dinner at an outside table. The view of the lake ringed by mountains, some nice food and drink, the evening’s absence of the day’s tourist hordes is lovely.