Salzburg

This morning we docked in Linz, Austria, and then we were off to Salzburg, also in Austria, for a full day of touring. Salzburg is billed as ‘The home of Mozart and The Sound of Music’. We travelled for about an hour to a small village called Mondsee, which is set on a rather large Lake at the foot of some really tall, rugged mountains. Some of the scenes from the Movie “Sound of Music” were filmed in this area. The Roman Catholic Church in Mondsee, which was originally a Benedictine Monastery, was the place where, in the movie, the Von Trapps were married. This Basilica is extremely ornate with its sculptured pulpit and seven famous baroque altars. The town itself is quite quaint with some attractive buildings and with lovely flower box gardens on almost every window sill.

 

From Mondsee, we then travelled another ½ hour or so to Salzburg, the 2^nd largest City in Austria. First stop we visited the Palace and the lovely gardens, we then  walked over one of the numerous bridges over the River Salzach and into the Old Town. Here we had a walking tour around this part of the City, and then had free time to explore by ourselves. Unfortunately it began to rain almost as soon as we started walking, so, it wasn’t all that pleasant fighting our way through the very crowded narrow streets, armed with umbrellas. We firstly visited the house where Mozart was born, a small museum is now housed here. Although there are lots of narrow streets here, every now and then these opened up into largish squares where markets stalls ply their trade most days of the week. Most of the shops here have wrought iron signs with characters appropriate to their type of shop, hanging out the front of the shop…all very nice. Even Macca’s had one. There are 2 lovely large Churches, both heavily decorated,( as they all seem to be over here in Europe) but distinctly different to each other, in one of the squares. We did seek refuge in one of these when the rain got heavier towards the end of our time here. Rides in horse drawn carriages seemed popular, and there was a funicular which one could catch up to the Castle on top of the hill overlooking the City. We didn’t have enough time to do this as it turned out. Despite the rain, we thought this City was very nice and we enjoyed our day there.

 Mozart lived here