Salzburg, Austria

Our hotel in Munich

Although the alarm was set for 6:30, we awoke at the King’s Hotel a little after 6 am to shower and do our daily German lessons. We met Cindy and Jodie at breakfast, which, as always, was excellent. At 9 am we left the hotel for the train station and found the train that would take us to Salzburg, Austria, where we would meet the Panorama Tours group for the “Sound of Music” tour. Because the rail strike had been resolved, there were many passengers on the train who, like us, had planned to take this train earlier in the week. We were fortunate to find four seats together for the 90 minute high speed rail trip to Salzburg. It appeared that nearly every seat in our car was taken.

Sacher Hotel in Salzburg

After arriving in Salzburg, we did our usual walk around the city from the train station until we got our bearings and headed for Mirabell Park in the old part of Salzburg. We walked by Mozart’s birthplace and the Sacher Hotel, famous for their Sacher Tort, a small cake selling for 50 euros. We could see St. Peter’s Archabbey that has been in Salzburg since 696 AD. It is still a Benedictine monastery, producing a popular local beer. Nonnberg Abbey across the river from the monastery is where Maria Von Trapp was training to be a nun and was later married to Col. Von Trapp. We walked through the Mirabell Christmas Market then through the nearby Mirabell Gardens where several scenes of “Sound of Music” were filmed. At 2 pm we met the Panorama Tours bus at Mirabell Plaza and boarded the bus taking us to sites from the Sound of Music movie as well as authentic places where the Von Trapp family lived.

Cindy, Mary & Jodie in Salzburg

On the tour, we learned that the movie crew was in Salzburg for 11 weeks for filming, using many homes, parks and street scenes. Most of the residents of Salzburg were unaware or apathetic of the movie filming. Our guide told us that the film crew decided to film a street scene early in the day since Nazi flags would be hung throughout the town. They wanted to have the flags removed before the town’s residents awoke and moved around town. However, light rain caused a delay in filming. The flags hung longer than expected, upsetting many since filming was done less than 20 years after the end of the war.

Castle Leopoldskron

The guide also told us that three houses were used to film the Von Trapp home. Scenes showing the grounds of the home were shot at a small man-made lake at Castle Leopoldskron, shots of the home’s exterior were filmed at Hellbrunn Castle and interior scenes were shot in a Hollywood studio. In reality, the marriage of Georg and Maria took place in Nonnberg Abbey, the only wedding ever to have taken place there in their 1300 year history. The film crew was not permitted to use the Abbey for filming, so a chapel in Mondsee was used.

The bus stopped for us to exit at the lake at Castle Leopoldskron, where the boat scene was filmed. We took a few snapshots and learned how the smallest child nearly drowned in the scene when the boat capsized.

Gazebo from The Sound of Music

We drove past Nonnberg Abbey then on to Hellbrunn Palace before we got out again. There was a bustling Christmas Market at Hellbrunn, but we just walked around to the park where the gazebo was relocated after the completion of filming. This is the smaller gazebo used for filming. A second, larger, gazebo is on a Hollywood backlot. We were only out of the bus for a few minutes, long enough to take a few pictures. We walked along a path was used in several scenes where Maria was walking with the children.

Mondsee, Austria

Our final stop was at Mondsee, where the wedding scenes were filmed. We had nearly an hour to visit the small Christmas market and see the chapel. We walked by the lake then on to the bus to return us to Salzburg. Our train from Salzburg to Munich was scheduled to depart Salzburg at 8 pm, arriving at Munich’s main station a little before 10 pm. Since we had already walked through the gardens at Mirabell, we skipped that part of the tour after leaving the bus. We hoped to catch an earlier train for Munich just after 6 pm, but once arriving at the train station, we learned that the earlier train had been cancelled. To use the 90 minutes or so until our scheduled departure, we walked around the small Salzburg train station. Cindy and Jodie had a hot chocolate from a McDonalds in the train station. We were glad to have a warm place to sit. The weather in and around Salzburg had actually been very good with temperatures in the mid 30s and little wind. The warm McDonalds still felt good to us.

Our train to Munich was an ICE but still had a number of stops at towns between Salzburg and Munich. The train was fairly full, probably because of the cancellation of the 6 pm route as well as rail strikes earlier in the week. As we crossed from Austria into Germany, the police came through the train car checking for passports, which we had easily accessible in my backpack.

There was a light rain as we walked from the train station to the hotel so we stayed underground in the subway system until we were as close as possible to the King’s Hotel. Everyone went straight to the rooms and prepared for an early departure to Heidelberg on Sunday morning.