Here is a view of the palace in the opposite direction. Note the fortress high above on the mountain. Please ignore the crane. It was impossible to crop out when taking pics.
Now, the kids had to humor me with several hundred Sound of Music pictures (not really, but it felt like it to them). Skipping around the fountain...
And a posed picture mid-skip...
Running through the arbor...
Visiting the dwarf park...There was a set of twelve dwarves, modeled after real people that served the prince-archbishop around the year 1600, but characterized as dwarves. I liked this guy. I thought my Dad would probably like him because he has a walking stick.
Greeting another dwarf...
Jack posed alone with this guy, because one of the Von Trapp sons poses with him in "Do-Re-Mi".
And the finale...I made the kids pose with me on the steps the same way the kids and Maria do, as Julie Andrews hits the high note at the end of the song. There was lots of eye-rolling going on at this point, but they hung in there for one last picture.
After our photo shoot, we headed toward the funicular, so that we could ride up to the Hohensalzburg Fortress. We passed through the Saturday morning farmer's market along the way and found some real edelweiss. I know that the song "Edelweiss" was written specifically for Sound of Music and has no authentic Austrian meaning, but the song means a lot to me. I often sang it to the children as a lullaby when they were babies. It was really neat to find actual edelweiss for sale.
Next stop was the funicular. We had prime seats for the trip up the mountain.
Here are the kids at the top with the fortress that was built around the year 1100 by the Catholic Church. It was used to intimidate any would-be-attackers of the city, and it worked, as there was never a battle fought here. It sits 400 feet above the Salzach River. We ate lunch at a cafe right outside of the fortress with some incredible views. We also had a great breeze, while no air was stirring down in the City below.
We walked up to the highest point of the fortress and were rewarded with these amazing views.
Here is a great picture of Dan with the kids.
We decided to walk back down out of the fortress. The walk was quite steep at points.
Then, we took advantage of the beautiful weather and great breeze by prolonging our time above the City with a 30 minute hike across the Monchsberg ridge. We saw some beautiful homes and more great views of Salzburg below.
After we hiked back down to the City, we visited Mozart's birthplace. It was crawling with tourists and very hot inside, but Sidney and Lyndon really enjoyed learning about Mozart and his family. Even with all of their fame and success, Mozart's family continued to rent this small apartment for years.
You weren't supposed to take pictures, but Dan broke the rules. Here was a small piano owned by Mozart's family.
This was their main living space. The furniture did not belong to Mozart's family, but it was the family's landlord's furniture from the time period.
We found the most interesting part of the museum to be the elaborate set designs of many of Mozart's operas in small scale display boxes. It really helped the kids understand how detailed the sets for operas are, so the need for 100 stage hands and three backstage areas at the Vienna Opera House finally made sense to them.
We concluded our fabulous day with an anniversary dinner at a local Indian restaurant. Dan and I re-created our wedding toast with Coca Light (Europe's version of Diet Coke), and Sidney took a picture. Dan is really outdoing himself with these amazing trips. I am one lucky bride!
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