Maria Brettfall, a pilgrimage church above the village of Strass im Zillertal,Tirol.

About three weeks into our stay on this little dairy farm, the old girl was trucked off to the slaughter house and the little black and white calves sold. The cow was ten, the calves were about eight weeks old. I was surprised how saddened I was by this moment of real farm life; I felt better when I learned that Uschi, the farm wife, gets sad too whenever they have to dispatch a cow.

There are 16, or is it 18, dairy cows on the farm where we rented our room for the month of July. They are “fleckvieh” — big cream and tan spotted ladies with white eyelashes and sturdy hips. They go out in the morning to the meadow behind the house, or to the meadow behind the barn, and then, in the late afternoon, they wander back to the barn almost independently, for milking. If the weather permitted and the timing was serendipitous, I would sit on the bench with my back to the big farmhouse and watch the girls head home in disorderly single file. The milking machinery would whine in the barn for an hour or so, I would pretend to read the Austrian newspaper, and then, when the weather chilled, I would go inside.

The farm next door has about the same number of cows, maybe a few more. They’re a different breed — “murbodner” –  and while I wouldn’t say this in the barn here, I’ll tell you that they’re prettier than the fleckvieh on our farm. The murbodners are a creamy brown all over, almost taupe, with big brown eyes and soft lashes, and they’re, well, attractive. This doesn’t mean I’ve lost my affection for our girls, just that the neighbor girls are more likely to be prom queens.

We walked through the grazing meadows almost daily. Sometimes, I would take pictures of the cows, sometimes I would sing to them, sometimes I would just talk to them. Our girls are always quite interested in company, they always turned to look at me and once, they followed me along the fence line, all of them, as though I was going to take them somewhere, to sweeter grass, or a creek that was easy to drink from, or a place where their calves are not sold off to be fattened for grass fed burgers.

A new calf named Goldi arrived at the farm shortly before I arrived. She was hand fed and she was like a dog, you could scratch behind the ears and she would wag her tail at you, and bat her luscious white eyelashes and nudge you with her soft funny nose. I visited her in the barn almost every day when I first arrived, but then, after the other calves were sold, I stopped because I did not want to become too attached and to feel sad again. Goldi will stay on the farm, though, she could very well be here the next time we visit Austria, as long as she does what she’s supposed to do.

I stopped to talk to different herds of cows nearly every day. Grass fed beef cows, dairy cows in meadows, cows clustered in muddy stalls, cows lying on the knee deep pastures chewing and studying the horizon.

I started to really like the cows, a lot. I liked their lethargic pace, their passive curiosity, the way they’d look up when I stood at the fence. I imagine them saying to each other, in somewhat British tones, “What’s all this now?” and “Darling, don’t give up your dandelion salad, but get a load of the two-legs at the fence. Does she not know that thing is electrified?”

I have zero ambition for farming, it’s awfully hard work, and dirty, and the cows don’t take a day off, so you can’t, not unless you have trustworthy help. And there is a little bit of heartbreak, you can’t help but become attached, or rather, I’m sure I would become quite affectionate toward the old girls. Ten years, some dogs don’t live that long, and I have had no business partnerships that have lasted that long. I would be sad, I think, at every loss, every parting. I would ascribe personality traits to the ladies that transited my yard every day, twice a day, and I would think them my friends, I think, after a time.  I would suck as a farmer.

But cows. After hanging out with them this summer, I know this: I like cows. And I’ll miss these girls, their mud splattered sides, their lazy walk, the way they always took time to look up and study whatever oddity happened to stop at the fence posts. “What’s all this, then?” We could all stop a look a little more, don’t you think?

The 2am train from Schwarzach-St Veit to Salzburg was full. I walked up and down the carriages looking for a spot to perch. There didn’t seem to be any coach class, so I looked through the glass doors of the compartments to find an empty seat. There were sleeping bodies sprawled across every open seat. There was one carriage where the two occupants – a man and a woman – were sleeping upright on the same side but opposite ends of the eight-seat compartment. I opened the door and stepped over legs that were resting on the opposite seat, settling between the two passengers who were resting, eyes closed, but not asleep. I lay back and closed my eyes.

When we got to Salzburg the man lifted his bag from the overhead rack and left the train. The woman stayed in her seat by the window. I moved to the far corner of the compartment, by the door.

‘Sie gehen auch nach Muenchen?’ I asked, to indicate that I didn’t find her repellent, I just wanted to give her some space. She was tall, blonde and 30-something. There was something Slavonic about the long curved face. She was dressed for the night-train, a loose grey sweat-suit with ankle-socks. She smiled pleasantly and nodded. I leaned back into the corner of my seat and closed my eyes, leaving my feet on the floor. After a few minutes she stretched out full-length across the row of seats opposite and fell asleep, a blanket for a pillow.

We were both asleep when we crossed the border into Germany. The glass door opened suddenly and the light flashed on. There was a man in the carriage, speaking rapidly, something about passports. He had a friendly demeanor and he looked like a cop in plain clothes. I pulled out my passport and handed it to him. He looked at it, smiled, asked me whether I was Irish and where I was going. Then he handed it back and wished me a good trip.

Still blinking in the garish carriage light, my carriage-mate handed over a plastic identity card. ‘You are Polish?’ the official inquired. She nodded. ‘You were in Austria?’ he pursued. She nodded. ‘You now want to visit Germany?’

‘Das ist Verboten?’ she inquired acidly. The shadow of a scowl crossed his good-natured face. ‘Just need the information,’ he responded. He spoke into his walkie-talkie, calling out her name and date of birth. ‘Ja, ja, vier-und-sechsig’ he repeated. 1964? Dang, I would have put her at 1977. Maybe it was vier-und-siebsig? Although mostly I had seen her asleep on a train seat, the guilelessness of sleep and the student pose takes years off you. But 47? No way. Respect.

Still. If she hadn’t slapped him down, would he have read a lady’s age out loud? Perhaps.

We chatted after he left. Neither of us had managed to buy a ticket before boarding, you couldn’t buy them online and you couldn’t buy them from the dispenser in the stations. Nobody seemed to work in the small railway stations, so you couldn’t buy them at a desk. But I was wary of sitting on a Teutonic train without a ticket.

‘Die Osterreicher Fahrkarte-verkaufer, ich hattet angst die vor,” I admitted. I was scared of the Austrian on-board ticket seller.

‘Ich auch,” she admitted.

The train conductor had looked as though she was constructed entirely of ham hocks, jammed into her OBB uniform.

She demanded my ticket and I pulled out the ticket that I had purchased from a machine, because it seemed to most closely resemble the ticket I needed. It seemed to cost roughly the right amount and since the ticket machine wouldn’t allow me to spell out Muenchen, I thought that it might suffice.

‘This is not the right ticket,’ she announced gleefully.

‘I tried to buy the right ticket, on the internet and in the station,’ I said. ‘There was nobody there to ask.’

‘This ticket is not guilty,’ she announced, holding it up like a winning lottery ticket, a grin so wide it looked like her head might split. I shrugged. No point in fighting the system, not when you’re on the one-and-only night-train to Salzburg.

‘Could I please buy the right ticket from you?’ I asked. She gave me a tight-lipped grimace. The ticket might not have been guilty, but I certainly was.

My compartment-mate was coming away from visiting her sister, who had just had a little baby girl. She was on her way to Munich, then onwards to Berlin, then by bus to Stettin. She was afraid to fly.

‘Better to take valium, then close your eyes and fly,’ I offered. She nodded in agreement.

Twenty minutes from Munich, the compartment became jammed with commuters. When get got to the HauptBahnof we nodded farewell, fellow night-train travelers among the commuters and then headed out into the rat race.

As I waited for them to call the flight to Dublin, I ate my Mozart-Kugel, (snuck into my bag by a kind host as I left Aigen) and reflected on a fine weekend. On the Salzburg monastery hostel, with a bedrooms as narrow as passageways; at breakfast, the garrulous grandmother from New Orleans bemoaning the Obama administration’s cutbacks on the space programme; on the bookshop that had a full-sized poster advertising ‘Sisi Die VampirJaegerin,’ but who couldn’t find it in stock; on the gingerbread Austrian village with the dirndals and the reliquary in the crypt of the church; of beers and conversations between 72%-Deutsch speakers and native Styrians on the modern sensibilities of fox-hunting and the imminence of global economic collapse; and on the likelihood that a thunderstorm would soak the documents lying on the bedroom windowsill, while we three sang Folsom Prison on the pristine concrete, steel and glass platform of a deserted midnight railway station.

Ciaran Buckley is an author and recovering journalist. Based in Ireland, he writes about technology and rural life on his blog. You can meet him if you stay at the 4-star accessible self-catering accommodation in Ratoath-Ashbourne on the Duffy family farm.

On the building from whence said Linzer Auge appeared there was a little sign that said that the bakery was once the home to a historic gingerbread maker. The place also produced mead and candles. It was all about the honey in 1405, apparently.

I looked at the sign for a while. “Luxury items,” I said to my sister in law, R. “And all having something to do with bees!” she added, insightfully.

We’d ended up in Schaerding, (the husband J, sister in law R, and myself) because, for the third time the navigation software on J’s new phone had sent us somewhere we could not go. This time, the map wanted us to drive up a road that was closed.

The previous time, in Salzburg, the navigation sent us into a pedestrian zone, underneath some funicular tracks, through a castle gate, and after all that, it informed us that we were, at our destination. We walked for another 15 minutes down the narrow, steep path to the market plaza below. We’d left the car parked at the blue “Pedestrians Only” sign and didn’t try to force it over Salzburg castle’s historic stone walkways.

This time, when faced with the “road closed” sign, we turned off the navigation and referred to the atlas. It made sense to go to Schaerding, so we did. And when the signs said “Schaerding, Beautiful Baroque City” we stopped to have a look. Schaerding is indeed pretty and baroque, with brightly painted houses facing into the main square. Some of them have beautiful stucco embellishments; many of them have little flip hairdo roof lines.

In addition to her baroque finery, the city has some medieval architecture, the gates – including the Linz Tower, right next to the Linzer Bakery – the stone fortress walls, a fresco or three, and some high water markers from the Middle Ages. The city sits on the banks of the Inn river – it’s now the border between Germany and Austria.

Schaerding has about a dozen shoe stores in the heart of the city, two of them had wrought iron signs that featured shoes sculpted shoes. If you were unable to read, you still could figure out that yep, this was the place to get your footwear needs addressed. If that wasn’t enough, each merchant guild had an assigned color. Bakeries were blue.

At the Linzer Bakery, I tried to imagine a history for Schaerding. Clearly, it was a well to do village in the baroque times, the houses were big and had lots of windows. The gingerbread bakery/mead cellar/candle maker was much older, but I suppose things weren’t so bad in Schaerding in the 1400s either – after all, if the town could support a business offering such treats, the resident’s basic needs must have been met. The prevalence of shoe stores made me wonder if they hadn’t also had a thriving leather trade.

The area around Schaerding is abundant farmland. It’s not quite Austria’s bread basket, that’s further northeast, but the rolling hills were covered with grain crops – oats, rye, spelt. The farmhouses were big three and four floor blocks with gated courtyards and often, dairy barns. The land smelled of grass and cows, and at one point, the air was thick with the heavy scent of honey.

I wasn’t far off with my imagined history for the city. Schaerding was a trade center for all kinds of goods, with an emphasis on textiles, from as early as the 900s. The city brochure says that Schaerding shuffled back and forth between Austria and a then independent Bavaria for many years — both sides wanted the city. There were wars and fires and floods, and the plague, and at the end of World War II, the city was bombed by American forces. Now it’s touristy on a small scale, there are a handful of boutique hotels in the city center and a public art project which replicates the seven wonders of the ancient world.

The center of town was lively on a weekday morning. The cafes were busy, there were two tour groups taking a walking tour. Parking wasn’t difficult but the lot was far from empty. Many of the old houses were beautifully renovated. We walked in to a courtyard that sold garden sculptures, more luxury items. Ivy climbed the fortress walls, little flower boxes bolted to the lookout tower held neon colored petunias. The city was immaculate.

By the end of the day, I’d pieced together more about Schaerding. The city brochure and walking guide (happily bilingual, in German and English) opens with a brief essay about Schaerding’s prosperity. There are brief descriptions and historical facts about significant buildings and towers within the old city.

The guide does not include the 1405 bakery where I ate my Linzer Auge. J, ever the indulgent travel companion, asked the waitress for more information about her 600 year old place of employment. “Sorry, I’ve got nothing.” she replied.