After another rather sleepless night when another group of girls set their alarm for 4AM and let it go off constantly for 30 minutes, then they banged around for another hour before finally leaving. We woke up about 8 to go on the Sound of Music tour.
We met this really cool girl on the tour, Tessalee, and she had a similar experience of someone at 4AM wrapping all of his clothes individually in plastic for an hour. "Crinkle crinkle crinkle." New shirt- "Crinkle crinkle crinkle." Unfortunately, we didn't exchange contact information after the tour, because she was awesome.
Anyway, the Sound of Music tour started in Salzburg, where we went to the lake where the back of the house was filmed in the movie. The front of the house and the back of the house are two different movies.
My tour guide was the same tour guide from 4 years before. I recognized him because his voice sounds a bit like a dramatic cartoon character.
He also told a lot of cheesy jokes, which were pretty funny.
"Mozart's grave was found in Vienna. A couple tourists stumbled upon some of his sheet music in the graveyard and the notes were disappearing. Mozart was decomposing!"
The house is quite beautiful. It is now used for seminars. As I mentioned in the previous blog, the gazebo was located there until they got tired of tourists jumping the fence to dance in the gazebo. And then later, it was permanently locked when an 82 year old women broke her him trying to jump between the benches. It sounds like Grammy when she broke her him trying to jump over a fence at 87 years old.
During the filming of the scene where the children and Maria fall in the lake, the actress who played Gretel fell backwards in the wrong direction and she couldn't swim and nearly drowned. Obviously she did not drown since she completed the movie and was not a ghost.
Julie Andrews sneeze singing.
We then drove to Hellbrunn Palace for a brief stop at the gazebo, but Adrienne and I had our pictures there already.
We also drove by the front of the house, which you can see in the distance here, along with the path where all the children hang from trees.
We looked at Nonnberg Abbey.
Then we drove out of Salzburg and through the beautiful Alps, past several lakes which are in the opening helicopter scene of the movie.
These are some pictures from the window as we were driving, which is why they are a bit crooked.
We stopped on the outskirts of a town called St. Gilgen, which is on the Wolfgangsee (lake). There were lots of para-gliders out for the day, which was very cool.
We had a discussion with Tessa Lee about how we didn't think we could go paragliding or bungee jumping. Tessalee recommended not bungee jumping if you are a well endowed woman, or to wear several sports bras. Apparently her friend went and said it felt like your bosoms got ripped off. And then ripped off again as you started to fall again. Yikes.
It confirmed my need to never go bungee jumping.
Here we are with our new best friend for the day, never to be seen again.
We then headed to Mondsee, location of the church used for the wedding scene in the movie, approximately an hour outside of Salzburg. It's a very cute, very small and colorful town.
Everything was decorated with lots of color.
My favorite row of buildings.
This was the church!
We went inside, wandered around a bit, got some holy water and a postcard as a souvenir, then walked around the town.
We got an amazing chocolate croissant for breakfast.
Adrienne with a perfectly centered photo.
Adrienne failing at getting most of the pretty backgrounds into the picture with me.
We lost Tessalee for a bit when she went to the bathroom and we looked in a shop, but we all found each other again at the lake. We sat by the lake for a bit and put our feet in the water, which felt wonderfully cold on our travel worn feet. The lake is fed by a glacier, so the water is very cold, even in summer.
It's quite a beautiful lake. I believe it is called Mondsee because it is shaped like a moon.
Adrienne with her feet in the water.
A found coming out of a grate in the ground.
Back in Salzburg, we headed to the Mirabell Gardens to look at the troll statues, also present in the movie.
Tessalee joined us as we hiked up the other small mountain across from the castle, to experience another fabulous view of Salzburg from a different angle.
There's the castle and most of Salzburg!
There are a lot of old walls on the hike up.
There's also what appears to be a snake, but who knows what it is.
A strange small man in the wall.
We found a sign that supposedly led us to the theater of the final Edelweiss song before they escape from the movie. You can go visit the theater, but we could not for the life of us find us. We wandered around this air conditioned tunnel for a long time and were never able to find the theater, which was unfortunate.
We walked around a little more, parted ways with Tessalee because we had to head back to the hostel to grab our bags and catch our train.
We made a brief detour at this footbridge, another scene from the movie, so Adrienne could get pictures of her running and jumping across the bridge. Our train was at 4 and at this point it was 3:30, so we quickly grabbed our bags and basically sprinted (as usual, there's always sprinting, even when I'm on time) to the train station and got there with 15 minutes to spare. Salzburg is a small town, so it was easy to get to the station from our hostel.
I was very hot and my face was very red by the time we got to the platform, where we discovered our train was delayed for 20 minutes. Aka the sprinting was unnecessary.
We headed back to Vienna for the last weekend of our trip.
Adrienne, pre-running.
Jumping/skipping.
Clicking her heels!
Who knows.
Really, who knows what she's doing.
Here I am, not running or skipping, so as not to embarrass myself.
