As always, there was loads of food left over. But I had a plan.
I'd been warned in advance that Austrians celebrate on Christmas Eve even more than Christmas Day itself.
"Everything will be closed", warned a friend. "You'll go hungry if you don't take food to Salzburg with you", advised the blogosphere.
So I did. I packed up a dozen potatoes, a quarter of a turkey and a few Yorkshire puds into a massive Tupperware and took it with me to Salzburg.
The problem was, they were all wrong. Everything was open. And what's more, it never occurred to me that we'd need to eat long before we could check not our hotel and use a microwave at 2pm. So, of course, we bought some German pastries from a bakery and ignored the roast.
But I didn't want to throw it away.
We could't eat it the next day because we were on the Sound of Music tour. So, it accompanied us on the overnight train across the Italian border to Venice.
We didn't eat it in Venice either.
We arrived home with a dozen unrefrigerated potatoes, a quarter of an unrefrigerated turkey, and a couple of unrefrigerated Yorkshire puds.
I was home alone the next day (frantically processing photos so I could blog about Salzburg before we flew out again, as it happens).
When I unpacked my suitcase, the five day old roast looked mighty appealing.
So I ate it. Almost all of it. Even the turkey.
And I didn't get sick!
So the moral of the story is, if you want to take your Christmas dinner to three countries before eating it, you'd better be in the Northern Hemisphere!
The same roast on the same table, five days and three countries later!
