Who Says You Can't Go Back?

In the early 80's, I bought a book published by Sunset called Discovery Trips in Europe.  On its cover was a beautiful photo of a lake with a small village and a chapel. The photo was of Hallstatt, Austria and that photo has become almost iconic in that it has been featured on Austrian travel posters for years. Anyway, when I was in Europe back in 1984 I wanted to go to Hallstatt and replicate that photo myself. While I did go there, for some reason I didn't get to take that shot. I can't remember exactly why. Maybe, it was the weather or maybe it was just I couldn't find where it was taken; I just don't know. What I clearly remember was thinking that Hallstatt was beautiful. When I planned this vacation, I worked this village in the Salzkammergut Region not far from Salzburg and Bad Ischl into our itinerary. When I did that I wondered if it was as lovely as I thought it was. You know how sometimes your memory can play tricks on you and when you go back to somewhere you've been before, it just isn't as good as you remember? Well, in this case, yes, you can go back and it is even more stunning than I thought. We arrived here in this now UNESCO designated site midday yesterday when the sky was almost perfectly clear and the temperature was about 26'. We had a lovely lunch on the lakeside terrace at the Hotel Grunen Baum. Later, we just wandered around this little village enjoying is quaintness including all the wooden houses perched on the mountainside like, as someone said in the 1800's, little swallows birdhouses. We had a lovely dinner in the Brau-Gasthof, a building that has stood for hundreds of years and was a former brewery, hence its name.  And, oh yes, I got that photo!  It is the first one of the four below.  The others are of the setting on the lake and mountains, the market square and dinner at Brau-Gasthof.