Yodel-ai-eeeeeeeeeee

The hills are alive with the sound of music………and so we got on the Sound of Music tour bus with a bright bubbly “Maria” (I think her real name was Nicole) dressed in the Austrian/Sound of Music dress. This was a four hour bus trip hitting all the main places that they filmed the outdoor scenes for the movie.

Salzburg is only a small town, of approximately 150,000 people the town….3 million tourists come to the city and 300,000 of those come because of their love of the movie. Most Austrians have never seen the movie. If you have never seen it, (hmmmmm)  it is based on the true story of Marie Von Trapp, who came as a governess to the 7 children of Captain Von Trapp, an Austrian widower. She ended up marrying him and they had 3 more kids. They fled Austria in 1938 when the Nazis took over.…not climbing over the mountains as the movie shows but on a train into Italy and then on to America…Vermont where they had a farm that they turned into a music camp.

In 1959  Rogers and Hammerstein, famous songwriting team, turned her story into the musical A Sound of Music,  on Broadway and then it was made into a movie in 1965.…one of the most popular movies ever.

We toured many of the places in the film and the tour guide gave us little stories about the area…the lake the children and Maria fell into the lake, the gazebo, the 2 different castles they filmed outside scenes, the church where the wedding took place and many more We drove into the hills around the city….everything is beautiful and green. The area is a lot like BC….coniferous trees, mountains….the main difference is that there are more green spaces /pastures up high and little towns way up in the middle of nowhere.

Oh and we also passed the house of the founder of Red Bull, he is from Salzburg….later in town we saw a “Red Bull World store.(these are for Cam)

We really enjoyed the tour and sang our way around…yes they had the music from the movie on and every once in a while she turned on another song. It is really amazing who knows the movie and its songs…..young, old, lots of different cultures singing along to all the songs….

After the tour we went to Mirabell Garden where they films a lot of scenes, a beautiful garden in the middle of town. There was a cache there where I met a young couple from Prague and we had a great talk about caching.


Sheryl had wandered off into some of the other part of the garden while I was chatting, and when I went in search of her she was napping on a park bench. Last night she didn’t get a lot of sleep…no it was not my snoring that kept her up but the Saturday night partiers below our window. There is a pub (The Music Pub) and other pub/restautrant down the street….once the places close up the people go into the street to finish their party. But the streets are narrow and their voices echo and bounce off the buildings on both sides of the street! She finally got to sleep about 5am (all the while I’m sleeping through this) so she was getting very tired by about 3pm. She decided to go back for a nap while I continued to walk.

I found a couple more caches and also other cachers at each place…and even the places I didn’t find the cache I met other cachers.

I went back to get Sheryl and we wandered with the many other tourists through Old Town….being Sunday most of the shops are closed except a few souvenir stores.

We had a nice schnizel dinner at a café that just had a robbery so the owner was a bit upset and they started to send away the new customers. Ice cream and another walk then I was ready for a rest so Sheryl went off and I put my feet up.

She came back a while later saying I should have come along….she found an path into the park behind our hotel that led to an amazing view of city,,,,the sun was going down and the thunder and lightning was starting again.