The hills are alive…

….with the Sound of Music Tour in Salzburg! Woo hoo! I do love the movie and believe we watched it every year in chorus when I was in middle school. Kristi, do you remember what our teacher’s name was? Anyway, the tour took us to most of the sights that were filmed in Salzburg. And yes, that's a cow painted with Sound of Music scenes that was next to where we caught the bus!

The first stop was Leopold’s Crown Palace which was the back of the Vonn Trapp house in the movie and then to the gazebo. The gazebo was left by 20th Century Fox after the shooting was complete, but was moved from Leopold’s Castle because so many people were jumping the wall to take pictures of it. Daddy, you’ll get a kick out of this…up until a couple of years ago you could jump from bench to bench inside the gazebo just like they did in the movie, but now it’s glassed in. Apparently, an 80 year old woman was ‘jumping’ from bench to bench and fell and broke her hip. Seriously? People have no sense!

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Back on the bus we drove around and saw various sites on our way out of town towards the wedding church in Mondsee. This is a picture of the fortress in town. We didn’t have enough time to climb up to it and go inside, but maybe I’ll get back to Salzburg before I leave. And…I will be walking because apparently it cost 10 euro to take a tram to the top and that’s about $15. No way am I paying that when I can walk up for free. Yep…put on your surprise faces that Zelda would rather walk 20 minutes straight uphill than pay $15 to ride! Ha! I’m not so worried about the uphill as I am about the coming down.

Making our way to the town of Mondsee we stopped at this overlook. This lake is glacier fed and Becky, you can almost see the greenish color [in this picture] like all the lakes and rivers in Alaska. They say this lake freezes over in the winter and the locals ice skate and have some sort of winter races on it. Can you imagine how cold it has to get here in the winter for the lake to freeze? I’m just glad I’m here in the summer!

Finally at the town of Mondsee, here’s a picture of me and Lauren in front of the church and a couple of pictures from inside the church. I love the pipe organ and the confessional. I even took a picture of the pews because I liked the carvings on them so much! The town is really cute too with the buildings different colors.

What I learned on the tour…1) there are a large number of people who have a strange attachment to the movie; 2) Salzburg and the surrounding towns are beautiful; and 3) no one in Austria has seen or cares to see the movie and thinks the Americans that take the tour are strange.

Back in Salzburg we went through the Mirabell Gardens where the do-re-mi scene was mostly shot. Here are pictures of the gardens themselves and a couple of silly ones of me.

At this point in the day, I’d had enough of the serious pictures and started acting retarded. Unfortunately, none of these can rival the couch pictures from just outside Salt Lake City.

We ended our day in Salzburg with a trip to a brewery…of course! The funny part about this brewery is that it’s attached to a church and the beer is brewed by monks! Lauren and I think the mugs were hand made by the monks as well, because they are all just slightly different. Notice the paper/card board utensils we ate with…very monkish!

And here's the final shot of Salzburg for the day. It's absolutely beautiful and I love how the fortress overlooks the town!