Salzburg

“The Sound of Music” Tour

We were collected from our hotel and delivered to the Panorama Tours Office, where we began our private Sound of Music tour with Matt. It was more expensive than the bus tour, but I didn’t want to subject strangers to my off-key singing. It was bad enough my family had to listen, but I love singing. I knew the words to all of the songs and sang as loud as my scratchy throat would allow.

We had just started watching The Sound of Music DVD in our room which refreshed our memories about some of the places we were about to see on the tour. I was accused of being a “bad mum” because Keeley had never seen the movie.

We visited the von Trapp house, the lake, the gazebo, the abbey and the amazing church in Mondsee where Maria was married to Georg von Trapp in the movie.

It was indescribably beautiful and unchurch-like. We visited two little villages on the lake and had a coffee and cake at Mondsee. I opted for the kaiserschmann wit zwetschkenroster: a delicious eggy pancake with a bowl of forest fruits. Everyone else had the frauenschuh (shoe of the woman) which was a rich chocolatey biscuit covered with more chocolate — far too rich for me.

Back to our hotel for a full 4-course Austrian dinner of carpaccio (raw meat thinly sliced), a salty soup with dumplings, turkey schnitzel and apple strudel accompanied by a mango bellini and a local rosé. It was quite late by the time we managed to crawl under our doonas in our Sound of Music themed rooms at the Hotel der Salzburger Hof.