Salzburg

We visited Salzburg, Austria, on our first visit to Europe. We first drove around town for awhile, then parked and walked to the Cathedral where they were preparing to televise an opera, or concert of some kind the next day. This Cathedral, already famous for many hundreds of years, is best known to Americans who have seen the movie, “Sound of Music.”

It had been raining so much, rather than stay in the VW Van in a campsite, we spent the night at the Hotel Stiegl, and ate steak dinners in the hotel dining room. Emmy and I had a regular room, and the two Lindas slept on folding beds in a conference room, with no bathroom. They had to get up early, a meeting was scheduled there, first thing in the morning.

We rode the funicular railway up to the Castle (begun in 1077 and completed in 1681) on top of the hill above the city. Later we stopped at the American Express office to pickup mail and money, and found that American Express, as well as most every tourist office in town, offers tours to the spots, near Salzburg, where the movie “Sound of Music” was filmed.

Each year we have visited Salzburg, it has rained and rained. Of course if it wasn’t for all the rain, the countryside wouldn’t look nearly so nice as it will if we ever get here when it isn’t raining. One year we followed the signs to a parking lot a few blocks from city-center, then rode the shuttle bus to the main city square. We walked the rainy streets, looking in this place and that, had a snack at the downtown McDonald’s, then walked, rather than ride the bus, back to the parking lot.

One year as we left Salzburg, we passed a very funny looking McDonald’s, far from the city center. It was in a two-story squarish building and was painted with diagonal stripes. There was street construction nearby, so it would have been difficult getting into the parking lot, to see the inside. Later, as she was making notes in her diary, Emmy remembered the McDonald’s as yellow and red, but I said, “No, it’s blue and white.”

It's amazing that people will remember something so differently. The next year we passed the unusual McDonald’s again on our way to downtown Salzburg, and we saw it was really red and gray. We do agree it’s very modern, and most unusual. Not the most important place in Salzburg, but it really was different than any we have seen elsewhere.