Again … apologies for the delay in posting. Internet has been intermittent and expensive for the last few days, so I, being the lesser overall priority, have not been able to send anything out and the catching up has been all-absorbing.
We are now in Munich, or Muenchen, as the locals call it. We stayed at a nice “apartment” style hotel but found the internet access to be less than what we needed so we moved to the A&O City Hackerbrucke – no kitchen but that’s okay at half the price with onsite laundry facilities. Okay, so they only kind of work and we ended up with soap residue on all of our clothes — at least we tried. We have been moving around so much that we haven’t had time to wash in a while and are almost all out of clean clothes so it was fortuitous and hopefully will dry before we have to “check out” of the room we’re in at 11 am only to check back into another room at 4 pm. Gotta end the hotel juggling soon. We’ll be in Munich for a while longer to allow Maylene the stability she needs to do some training over Skype. If anyone has been here and has recommendations of things to see and do – we’d love to hear it. Tripadvisor is helpful but Munich didn’t make my trusty guidebook and I feel lost without it. Pics of Munich to follow.
In the meantime, let’s talk Sound of Music, shall we? We had a lot of fun on the super-cheesy SOM tour in Salzburg. We loaded onto a bus with 48 other singing SOM fans and headed off to many of the locations used in the filming of the movie. They also took us all the way out to the lake district of Salzburg – a very beautiful area (and home to Red Bull). As Trudy, the tour guide put it, “They take all of the crystal clear, beautiful water from this lake and turn it into that nasty drink.” Hahaha… She was very entertaining and kept us laughing the whole time.
We definitely did our fair share of singing on the bus – though I have to admit – No, Mo – we couldn’t lead the sing-along. There were others that knew WAY more of the words to the more obscure songs than we did! 😉
Some of the more interesting tidbits from the tour: did you know that the eldest child was not Leizl but rather Rupert who himself refused to join the Nazi party as a young man? Yes, indeed – Maylene and I both thought that would make a much better story. BUT – then I guess you couldn’t have the “I am 16 going on 17” song… and the gorgeous little pavilion where the romance between Leizl and Rolf blossoms. We actually saw the gazebo but couldn’t enter it because, get this… a woman a few years ago decided that she needed her Leizl moment of skipping across the benches in the gazebo. Remember how the gap over the entrance is rather large and Leizl had to use Rolf’s knee? Well – this lady didn’t bring her Rolf and … actually, she was 82 when she had her Leizl moment. So she fell and broke her hip – tried to sue the palace where the gazebo is and of course failed because, as Trudy put it “we just don’t do that here in Austria.” LOL… no more gazebo moments for us. We also didn’t get to do the “hills are alive” dancing in the field moment because even though there are lovely fields in Salzburg to do that in, the filming was actually done in a private farmer’s field in Germany – so it wasn’t on the tour. Bummer…. Lots of other things were on the tour though:
