Living the Sound of Music

June 11

We woke up early this morning and enjoyed a gourmet breakfast at our hotel. It seems each breakfast has progressively been bigger and better. The breakfast at the Marriott was delicious. We had a variety of foods to choose from including French toast, omelets made to order, granola, fruit, etc. Good thing we’ll be able to eat this two more times!

The first city we visited today was Salzburg, Austria. This is the birthplace of Mozart and where Sound of Music was filmed and actually took place. It is a beautiful city. We parked and started walking around by the Mirabella gardens. Not only was it a beautiful garden, but part of Sound of Music was filmed here. This is where the children and Maria sing “Do Re Mi” and hop up and down the steps. It was gorgeous and there were a lot of roses in bloom.

From the rose garden at Mirabella there was a good view of the Hohensalzburg Fortress. It also provided a good view of the lower garden with the Pegasus fountain and other statues.

Another part of this garden was the dwarf garden. There were 12 or so little dwarf statues all in a circle in this garden. Some of them were cute or silly, some of them were a bit odd, but it was very unique. The VonTrapp children actually walk through this garden in the movie as well.

This is a view of Salzburg from the bridge crossing the river.

After walking around the garden we ate some Mozart chocolate and then went to one of the most famous streets in Salzburg, Getreidegasse. This street is full of shops, which turned out to be quite expensive, and also has the birthplace of Mozart. One thing that made the street so interesting was every shop had a metal baroque sign hanging in front of it. Even McDonalds had to have such a sign.

The next stop in Salzburg was St. Peters chapel and cemetery. Due to Euro 2008 (a fussball tournament) a lot of the famous fountains and buildings were surrounded by venue tents and such. However, we were able to see the cemetery at St Peter and go inside the chapel. Both were beautiful.

By this time Salzburg was packed with tourists, probably due to Euro 2008, and we had seen most of the sights we wanted to see so we grabbed a late lunch and took an hour and a half drive out to Hallstatt, a beautiful city between a salt mine and a lake.

It was a little overcast and sprinkling when we arrived, but it was still beautiful. As dad was taking a picture of me in front of the city view the light hit the city beautifully. It was amazing. We looked at the view for a little bit and then walked through the city. Parts of the city are supposed to be dated several centuries before Christ. From the looks of it, the foundations are about all that are still that old.

The city was just as cute and quaint as some of the other cities we’ve seen, but still with a unique charm. The buildings were brightly colored and flowers were growing all over. One of my favorite buildings had a tree that was trained to grow around the windows.

Not long after we made it to the heart of the city it started to pour rain. It rained for about 5-10 minutes so hard that we stayed under a tunnel waiting for it to let up. When it finally slowed down to just over a drizzle we walked out to the other end of the city to see the view of the other side of the city. It was still raining pretty hard but it was cool to see the city surrounded in gray.

We stopped at one of the restaurants and had some hot soup and delicious cakes and pancakes before we drove back to our hotel. It was really interesting to visit these two cities on the same day and see the contrast. While it is fun to see the sights in the bigger cities I really like the small towns, especially along a lake or ocean.