The Hills Are Alive

We took the train from Vienna to Salzburg, and spent two days there. Salzburg is gorgeous -- it's a beautiful little town tucked away in the mountains. (Of course, that didn't stop it from being packed with tourists from everywhere.)

Mirabell garden was just a few blocks from our hotel. The picture here shows just a small part of it. They had an amazing variety of flowers in bloom -- tulips, wisteria, peonies -- in all colors of the rainbow. We didn't go into Schloss Mirabell. It was originally a house/castle built by a bishop for his mistress and their fifteen (!!) children. It certainly was good to be the bishop in those days!

The center part of town is across the river. It's full of narrow winding streets filled with expensive shops. Like most of the rest of Austria, it was spotlessly clean.

One of the most interesting shops had thousands and thousands of handpainted eggshells, one for every occasion! Of course they had a great variety of Christmas and Easter themed eggs, but they also had Halloween, pets, flowers, and everything in between. Apparently egg-painting is a big cottage industry there, especially for housewives with artistic talent.

Although none of us are big Sound of Music fans, we decided to take the obligatory Sound of Music tour because it allowed us to get out into the surrounding countryside and see some of the little towns outside Salzburg. We went with a small company called Bob's Tours, and it was great -- instead of the huge tour buses, they use minivans. (And their "office" was a desk inside a clothing/souvenir shop.) So, our tour consisted of us and one other couple. It felt like a much more individualized experience, and it was a nice mix of background information about the movie and more general information on Salzburg. One amusing thing about our tour guide was that although she was a native German speaker, she spoke (excellent) English with an Irish accent (thanks to an ex-boyfriend).

One of the most fun parts of the tour was that we got to go on a luge ride! This fulfilled one of my lifelong dreams (okay, so it wasn't on ice and I didn't get the Olympic gold for it, but you can't have everything.)

We also went by the home of the creator of Red Bull energy drink. (Did you know that Red Bull was born in Austria? Neither did we.) According to our guide, the European version of Red Bull is four times more potent (caffeinated) than the US version. Yikes!