May Trip Germany 2 weeks

Hello Diane. In a day trip to Salzburg from Berchtesgarden, if you go on the S.O.M. tour from Salzburg, you would not have time to see Salzburg.
Salzburg is one of the most pleasant cities in Europe. A walking tour in Salzburg could be pleasant, you could do it without a guide.
I liked the Residenz Art gallery located in "New" Salzburg. It has good landscape paintings done in the 1800s. Old Salzburg can be walked through qickly.
I put a very low priority on visiting the Mozart House.

I was at Salzburg, five days. I am not aware of any need for the "Salzburg Card".

I wouldn't bother with a Sound of Music tour if you only have one day in Salzburg. Spend your time in the old part of the city -- see the Dom and the Fortress, walk along the Getreidegasse and the river. I lived in Salzburg before there was a Salzburg Card, so I'm not sure what that covers and I don't know if it would be of value or not. The DK travel guide probably outlines good walking tour routes, and I don't think you'd need a guided tour.

Rhine River: KD boat tours are great. We stayed in St. Goar and tour several KD tours . .. one from Bacharach to St. Goar and one to Koln and then a ferry across the river. We took the train to Cologne. I love St. Goar & Bacharach and would return to stay in either town.

Salzburg: Don't take a local guide city tour. You can do it yourself. I didn't take the SOM tour and I wished I had.

The Köln-Düsseldorf (K-D) line is the biggest one on the Rhein. See www.k-d.de. The "cruise" stops at every town on the river, so you can jump on/off. However, the boats, particularly headed up the river (St Goar, Bacharach, Rüdesheim) are excruciatingly slow. IMO the most interesting stretch is from Bacharach to St. Goar because you get a closeup of the Pfalzgrafenstein, that toll station mid-river. You also get to see the Loreley, but it is just a big cliff and you can see it just as well from the train on the Bacharach side.

You can leave St. Goar on the boat at 10:20, stop at Bacharach at 11:30, board the next boat at 13:30, and get to Rüdesheim at 15:15. Or, you can take the train from St. Goar (10:20) to Bacharach (10:30), be there 1:45, take the boat at 12:15 to St.
Goarshausen (13:05) and then take the train from there to Rüdesheim and get there at 14:10.

Thanks for the tips. At the k-d website I can't get into the schedule to get ideas of how we could move about. So I'll keep playing with that.

For Salzburg we'll just go and take yr suggestions of
walking about & enjoying the, sounds so good.

Need to firm up our first stop on the Rhine. Any good
suggestions for Bacharach lodging for 65-80 Euros for Db room?

Visited Dachau while on a 4wk trip to Germany & Austria in July. Do the "self-guided" tour, picking up one of those handheld recorders at the vistors center. That way you can see what you want and skip what ever (ovens). It is emotional,but there's a good film shown at the beginning of your "personal" tour.
K-D is the way to go going down river, we took the train back to Bacharach from St.Goar because going up river is very slow and we had a dinner date.
Have a great time, Oh! There's a great little wine garden on the"main street" in Bacharach. It's the only one on that street with a nice selection of wines & cheeses.